Plans for a Second Ave. subway line are rolling ahead - with two stations in lower Manhattan solidly on the drawing board.

The proposed line would run from 125th St. to the southern tip of Manhattan, with the final two stops - which had been under evaluation - at the South Street Seaport at Fulton and Water Sts. and at Hanover Square and Water St., according to a Metropolitan Transportation Authority document reviewed by the Daily News.

The document is part of a supplemental environmental impact statement that has been completed and will be the subject of public hearings next month.

After public input, the MTA is to complete a final impact statement and, after federal approval, begin the final design early next year. Further study could change the project. Construction is slated to begin at the end of next year.

"It brings us one giant step closer to a shovel going in the ground in 2004," said Manhattan Borough President Virginia Fields, a longtime proponent of the project.

There would be 16 new stations connecting about 8.5 miles of new track. The MTA estimates the $16 billion project will take 12 to 16 years to finish.

The goal is to relieve the stifling overcrowding on the Lexington Ave. line and provide more subway options and connections.

MTA drawings also show a spur from the Second Ave. line that would let trains turn west at 63rd St., then head to Brooklyn via the Broadway line, making its last Manhattan stop at Canal St. before heading over the Manhattan Bridge.

The MTA will conduct two public hearings on the draft next month: May 12, at the Alexander Hamilton U.S. Custom House at 1 Bowling Green, and May 13 at El Museo Del Barrio, Heckscher Building, at Fifth Ave. and 104th St. The hearings begin at 4 p.m.

Proposals to build a subway line along Second Ave. go back as far as 1929 but never got very far. Construction of some tunnel segments began, but work stopped in the 1970s because of the city's fiscal crisis.

The MTA's 2000-04 capital program commits more than $1billion toward the project for preliminary and final design, and the start of construction. The next capital program is expected to continue funding for the project, and officials are hoping for large amounts of federal funds in future years.

Fabb

April 6th, 2003, 01:21 PM

12 to 16 years to finish

I like that kind of never-ending stories.
Good luck to the 2nd Ave. line !

TLOZ Link5

April 6th, 2003, 06:37 PM

http://www.mta.nyc.ny.us/planning/sas/index.html

Everything you need to know about the project, including maps and a construction timeline.

DominicanoNYC

April 7th, 2003, 05:28 PM

I doubt it:(. Transportation is so much more difficult due to the fact that the closest train is on Lexington! Well for me any way.

TLOZ Link5

April 7th, 2003, 06:31 PM

I live on Second Avenue, so it's somewhat more convenient. *But I'd still need to walk several blocks in either direction to get to a station.

enzo

April 10th, 2003, 02:40 PM

I'm on York and this is LONG overdue.

sigh....I doubt I'll be living here TWO DECADES from now!!!!!

Kris

May 12th, 2003, 12:01 PM

Hearings Set For Second Ave. Subway

The Associated Press

May 12, 2003, 11:53 AM EDT

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority has scheduled public hearings to address the $16 billion construction of a Second Avenue subway line.

The hearings, scheduled for Monday and Tuesday, are expected to detail the impact of the project, which is intended to relieve overcrowding on the Lexington Avenue line and improve transportation for people on Manhattan's East Side.

The 8.2-mile line would run from 125th Street in East Harlem to Hanover Square in Lower Manhattan and could take between 12 and 16 years to complete.

At the hearings, officials will discuss issues including congested conditions at intersections within construction zones, displacement of residential and business tenants, and noise caused by construction conditions.

The hearings begin on Monday at 4 p.m. at the Alexander Hamilton U.S. Custom House Auditorium at 1 Bowling Green in Manhattan. Tuesday's hearing will begin at 4 p.m. at El Museo Del Barrio on 104th Street and Fifth Avenue.

From NY1 (http://www.ny1.com/ny/Search/SubTopic/index.html?&amp;contentintid=33394&amp;search_result=1)

East Side Residents Complain About Second Avenue Subway
SEPTEMBER 23RD, 2003

Hundreds of Upper East Side residents angered by plans for the Second Avenue subway packed a public meeting with the Metropolitan Transportation Authority Monday night.

"The noise, the pollution, the potential rats," one resident said, ticking off a common list of concerns.

The construction, estimated to take at least 12 years, is scheduled to begin next year, and residents are starting to think about the impact on their community

"We can show statistics saying that your property in 10, 15 years will rise, but for people who are going to be affected on a day-to-day basis, it hits home a little harder,” said Dan Quart of Community Board 8. “And those statistics are not really comforting."

"There are potentially people that are going lose their homes,” said Manhattan Assemblyman Jonathan Bing. “There are businesses that are going to lose their livelihood from decades being here in their locations on the East Side."

From Falk Drugstore, a fixture at the corner of 72nd Street for the last 50 years, to the popular Patsy's Pizzeria on 69th Street, to nationally owned chains like Rite Aid, the Second Avenue Subway could spell doom for dozens of businesses. Then there are apartment buildings like 301 East 69th Street, where construction will affect hundreds of tenants.

"I just bought this apartment six months ago, and now I find out – after I bought the apartment – that they're thinking about putting a subway system in our building, knocking out the restaurant downstairs,” said one resident.

While Monday's public hearing gave them a chance to air their concerns, some residents felt they weren't being heard.

"It seems like everything's set in stone,” said one woman. “They're really not listening to anybody. They're not giving answers. What happens to people who've put all their life savings into an apartment, and they're going to lose everything? The MTA doesn't care about that. They're just moving forward."

Still, local leaders say the need for the Second Avenue subway will make it worth the pain in the long run.

"It's almost like there's no choice,” said City Council Speaker Gifford Miller, whose district is on the Upper East Side. “You're looking at the most overcrowded subway line in the United States of America, which is going to have added to it 40,000 riders when the Grand Central connection occurs. I mean, it's a nightmare."

MTA officials so no final decisions have been made on where to build station entrances for the new line.

Despite the opposition, the project is moving forward. Construction is expected to begin by the end of 2004.

When completed, the Second Avenue Subway will stretch from 125th Street to Water Street in Lower Manhattan.

which is going to have added to it 40,000 riders when the Grand Central connection occurs

What's that about ? When will it occur ?

ZippyTheChimp

September 27th, 2003, 08:12 AM

Long Island RR East Side Access Project
Completion 2012

http://www.pbbulletin.com/Volume19_Issue_3/images/lead_map_lg.jpg

http://www.mta.info/mta/planning/esas/description.htm

billyblancoNYC

September 27th, 2003, 10:14 AM

Why does it have to be 2nd ave? Anyone know? Is there a less central, less commercial place to do it?

ZippyTheChimp

September 27th, 2003, 10:34 AM

It has to be east of Lex, so that leaves 3rd or 1st Aves.

It's the east side of Manhattan - no matter where it goes it will be a major disruption.

Fabb

September 27th, 2003, 11:11 AM

Why does it have to be a problem ?
Metro lines are being added to most of the major big cities in the developed world.

STT757

September 27th, 2003, 12:16 PM

East Side access is a project that will allow the Long Island Rail Road to access Grand Central Terminal, right now only Metro North trains from North of the City are able to access Grand Central.

Long Island Railroad , NJ Transit and Amtrak operate out of Penn Station.

The Long Island Railroad will be able to double the amount of trains into Manhattan, right now Penn Station is at capacity so this will allow LIRR to send more trains into Manhattan. It will offer LIRR travelers access to the East Side of Manhattan, LIRR will offer service to Penn Station (34th street) and Grand Central Terminal.

http://www.parsons.com/about/press_rm/potm/08-2001/index.html

There are also plans to build another "new" LIRR connection to Manhattan extending their Atlantic Ave branch under a new East River tunnel to Lower Manhattan

ablarc

September 28th, 2003, 02:38 PM

Stops on the Second Avenue Line are too far apart. The gaps between 72nd and 57th and between 57th and 42nd are both 15 blocks, or three-quarters of a mile. Adding the crosstown walk from some destinations like York Avenue, this will leave many people with still well more than a half-mile walk to the subway. There is also, inexplicably, a big 14-block gap in the densely-populated area between 86th and 72nd Streets. Why make all these people walk nearly twice as far as they need to? Additional stops are needed at 79th, 65th, 49th and 29th Streets.

As the example of Paris so persuasively demonstrates, train speed is MUCH less important to an efficient system than close proximity of stops and train headway. When you are walking to the subway you are approaching your destination at the speed of (at most) 4 miles per hour, and standing on a subway platform, you are progressing at exactly zero mph.

A second shortcoming of the proposed Second Avenue subway design is that it leaves the East Village with most of its presently-desperate subway service situation largely unaddressed. No new subway entrances are proposed over the two that presently exist. Having the additional option of riding the Second Avenue Line uptown will certainly be preferable to today's opportunities, but the walk to the subway will be exactly the same.

South of 14th Street, the Second Avenue Line should loop broadly into the East Village with maybe two stops. Can you imagine being able to hop a subway at Tompkins Square?

If all this money is going to be spent, it might as well be done right.

Zoe

September 28th, 2003, 04:30 PM

Adding to that, those additional stops should be for a local trains while the original proposed stops are for express. Also, I really think it would be money well spent to start the line on the west side of 125th. And have the train travel cross town along 125 first, then go down 2nd ave. Currently everyone north of the park must travel over 60 blocks south on the subway before they can head east or west, kinda silly. And if they are serious about the success of Harlem's resurgence, this would seem like a no-brainer.

TLOZ Link5

September 28th, 2003, 05:39 PM

The big stretch between the 86th Street and 72nd Street stations has to do with community activism. My family live on 78th Street and would have easily been served by the proposed 79th Street station, but the intersection is too heavily-developed. There are large apartment buildings at both northern corners and a major synagogue, Temple Sharaay-Tefila, on the southwest corner. A stop at 79th Street would have been extremely convenient, but now that the closest stop is six blocks away we'd be better off taking the Lex. At the very least it'll be a lot less crowded, though...80th or 81st Street would have been a better bet.

P.S.: I learned from an old NYT article that the Second Avenue Subway will become the 'T' train.

ablarc

September 29th, 2003, 08:11 AM

NIMBYs again. Don't they ever get tired of making places worse? Don't they ride the subway? They can thank themselves for the chance to exercise each time they make their longish trek to the subway. Or do they mostly ride around in taxis?

TonyO

September 30th, 2003, 04:17 PM

A second shortcoming of the proposed Second Avenue subway design is that it leaves the East Village with most of its presently-desperate subway service situation largely unaddressed. No new subway entrances are proposed over the two that presently exist. Having the additional option of riding the Second Avenue Line uptown will certainly be preferable to today's opportunities, but the walk to the subway will be exactly the same.

South of 14th Street, the Second Avenue Line should loop broadly into the East Village with maybe two stops. Can you imagine being able to hop a subway at Tompkins Square?

If all this money is going to be spent, it might as well be done right.

I agree, I live in the East Village and it would be a waste to not bring the line east below 14th. To get to a subway now, you either walk southwest to F/V, west to 6/N/R/Q/W or north to L.

NYatKNIGHT

October 1st, 2003, 10:08 AM

You're right, they should have a stop somewhere between 14th and Houston.

http://www.mta.info/capconstr/sas/

Map (http://www.mta.info/capconstr/sas/sas_alignment.htm)

Kris

October 21st, 2003, 01:23 AM

October 21, 2003

TUNNEL VISION

Tunnel to Nowhere, Except Maybe the Future

By RANDY KENNEDY

http://graphics7.nytimes.com/images/2003/10/21/nyregion/21TUNN.pillarxl.jpg
The Second Avenue subway tunnel, looking north. The money to continue to expand it ran dry in 1975.

Frank Jezycki has seen the future of the subway.

In fact, he saw it again yesterday morning, and it was just as dark as he remembered it.

"Here's a flashlight," he said to a visitor, "in case you get lost."

And with no further formalities, he clamped a hard hat on his head, tucked a map under his arm and led the way down into one of the most expensive monuments to thwarted ambition in all of New York City.

To the thousands of people who walk over it every day, the little rusty metal hatch in the sidewalk next to the bodega in East Harlem looks like just another door to another old basement. But this hatch, about as big as the top of a coffee table, is actually one of the only remaining entrances to a forgotten world.

"People who've lived up on the street around here for 20 years, they have no idea this is down here," Mr. Jezycki said.

What is down there, 45 feet below the asphalt, is the Second Avenue subway, or almost 10 blocks of what was to be the Second Avenue subway before the money ran dry in 1975, the digging stopped and the vast, echoing tunnel to nowhere was sealed up like the Cask of Amontillado.

It is the job of Mr. Jezycki and his men to remember that this hole is still there, to keep it company from time to time and to make sure that it is more or less ready to join the rest of the line when it is finally built, which could be any year now, according to state and federal officials. (Of course, that is basically what state and federal officials said in 1993, 1968, 1944, 1931 and 1920, the year a subway under Second Avenue was first proposed.)

But this time, they promise, it really is going to happen. In fact, jackhammers could be in the ground by the end of next year to start building a line from 125th Street to the southern tip of Manhattan, 8.5 miles of brand new subway at a cost of $16 billion, the first major expansion of the system since the 1940's.

One way or another, that new subway will have to rumble through the dim, musty cavern in which Mr. Jezycki stood yesterday, after descending a treacherous metal staircase that was rapidly losing a battle with rust.

At the bottom is what appears to be a seemingly endless unfinished movie set for a subway. The track bed is there, but with no tracks, ties or ballast.

The steel columns are there, set five feet apart, as they have been since the building of the first subway lines. Yellowish incandescent lights are strung from wires, giving the tunnel the strange feel of a nighttime deck party after all the guests have left.

But there is also something else down there, found nowhere in the real subway: absolute silence. The tunnel is lower than many Manhattan lines, and even its sidewalk grates have been plugged with concrete, so in many portions it is impossible even to hear the sounds of trucks roaring overhead. Instead, somewhere in the far distance the metronomic sound of water dripping into a pool can be heard.

Mr. Jezycki, a hydraulics supervisor, remembers going down into the tunnel in the 1980's, before a huge fan was installed to pump out the humid air. "You'd look into the distance, down the tunnel, and all you could see was fog," he said.

In the early 1980's, lacking money, the city — at Mayor Edward I. Koch's urging — considered renting out the tunnel and another completed stretch between 99th and 105th Streets. Among the ideas for putting the $65 million tunnels to use was a disco, a wine cellar, even a mushroom farm.

The tunnel might not be humid enough to grow porcini these days, but along some stretches, in the long concrete corridors that lead to dead ends, there are stalactites and even baby stalagmites that look like scoops of vanilla ice cream rising from the tunnel floor.

As a visitor heads south toward 110th Street, trying to feel out the way ahead in the darkness, he finally comes up against hard evidence of the fiscal crisis: a featureless concrete wall, past which there is only dirt and solid rock.

As if to underscore the dwindling promise of the tunnel at that end, the floor rises, making the ceiling appear much lower. This is so that ground water will drain to the middle of the tunnel, but it creates the disconcerting illusion that the tunnel is shrinking around you.

"It's like Alice in Wonderland or something," said Donald Dowler, a hydraulics maintainer, who had joined Mr. Jezycki in the tunnel yesterday. "Either this thing is getting smaller, or we're getting bigger."

On the way back to daylight, past a crumpled newspaper from the spring of 1999 and an empty bottle of Smirnoff vodka — practically the only signs of any past human presence — Mr. Jezycki pronounced the tunnel to be in pretty good shape, considering its age. Now all it needs to make it feel like home are trains, riders and of, course, rats.

"Trains bring the people, people bring the food, the food brings the rats," he said. "That's how it works."

http://graphics7.nytimes.com/images/2003/10/21/nyregion/21TUNN.guyxl.jpg
Frank Jezycki, a hydraulics supervisor who watches over the condition of the Second Avenue subway tunnel, entering it in East Harlem.

Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

Clarknt67

November 13th, 2003, 11:15 AM

South of 14th Street, the Second Avenue Line should loop broadly into the East Village with maybe two stops. Can you imagine being able to hop a subway at Tompkins Square?

If all this money is going to be spent, it might as well be done right.

You're right on both accounts. They should make an effort to space the upper east side stop closer to 10 blocks apart as that area is densely populated (besides, isn't the point of this multi-million expansion to give these people's feet a break?)

And again, I'm not sure why, if they're going to build this subway, they don't use it as an opportunity to give the East Village and Lower East side a break? It should turn East at 14th and follow the contour of the shore to service the alphabet avenues?

phxmania2001

November 13th, 2003, 04:52 PM

Adding to that, those additional stops should be for a local trains while the original proposed stops are for express. Also, I really think it would be money well spent to start the line on the west side of 125th. And have the train travel cross town along 125 first, then go down 2nd ave. Currently everyone north of the park must travel over 60 blocks south on the subway before they can head east or west, kinda silly. And if they are serious about the success of Harlem's resurgence, this would seem like a no-brainer.

Amen to that. I have to go into the Bronx whenever I want to get to the East Side. (Or take the bus, but that's no fun.)

Kris

November 13th, 2003, 04:59 PM

A trolley might be more indicated (and probable).

Nets7476

November 13th, 2003, 06:28 PM

If they built the line on 1st Ave to begin with, you wouldn't have to worry about following Manhattan's coast. Would have made those in Alphabet City and Yorkvile happier too.

Clarknt67

November 13th, 2003, 06:47 PM

If they built the line on 1st Ave to begin with, you wouldn't have to worry about following Manhattan's coast. Would have made those in Alphabet City and Yorkvile happier too.

well as there are already tunnels built beneath 2nd avenue in the upper east side it's unlikely they'll reroute it from 2nd on the UES. there's still hope for the LES.

then again, trains running through the far east village could be the end of the downtown drag/performance artist/starving artist scene down there, as it would inevitably become more attractive to those damn yuppies. it's one of the few remaining areas of Manhattan that is by any stretch of the imagination affordable.

TLOZ Link5

November 13th, 2003, 07:18 PM

Why? Is the stretch of the V and F lines that runs through the East Village/LES gentrified?

Clarknt67

November 13th, 2003, 09:03 PM

Why? Is the stretch of the V and F lines that runs through the East Village/LES gentrified?

Sort of, I mean it follows houston for a while and little italy and the village about Houston and coming along.

My point just being poor access to the subway can keep property values down and lead to more affordable housing. Running a subway through alphabet city would definately lead to higher property values. (what do real estate ads always say? Sunny &amp; near subways.)

green22

November 19th, 2003, 02:29 PM

There are more reasons than poor planning and community opposition for the lack of stops on the latest proposal for the 2nd ave line. Remember that this line was origninally planned as a 6 track, then 4 track and now 2 track line, (meaning no express service). It will be the only major north south line in Manhattan which is only 2 tracks for the length of it's route.

The only reason that the line will not connect to the Bronx yet is because the MTA does not have the funds to build the connection. 16 billion for the proposed portion is already as much as it would be able to take on. However the long term plans for the 2nd ave subway are to take pressure and riders off the Lex and maybe other lines by giving direct connections to the Bronx. The most likely connection would be to go north and east from 125th street to connect in the south Bronx.

The long term connection may not be built for 20 to 40 years depending on future priorities. Once it is built however, in order to get passengers from the Bronx to take the train down 2nd avenue to Manhattan, instead of taking the express trains down Lexington, there will need to be a limited amount of stops along 2nd avenue.

In a better world the 2nd avenue line would live up to its full potential as a 4 track express line with plenty of local stops, (it is very tough to upgrade a line once it is built). Of course in a better world the federal government would be as interested in building transit infrastructure as it was in building the interstate network for cars or in military spending for fuel.

Clarknt67

November 20th, 2003, 01:25 PM

There are more reasons than poor planning and community opposition for the lack of stops on the latest proposal for the 2nd ave line. Remember that this line was origninally planned as a 6 track, then 4 track and now 2 track line, (meaning no express service). It will be the only major north south line in Manhattan which is only 2 tracks for the length of it's route.

The only reason that the line will not connect to the Bronx yet is because the MTA does not have the funds to build the connection. 16 billion for the proposed portion is already as much as it would be able to take on. However the long term plans for the 2nd ave subway are to take pressure and riders off the Lex and maybe other lines by giving direct connections to the Bronx. The most likely connection would be to go north and east from 125th street to connect in the south Bronx.

In a better world the 2nd avenue line would live up to its full potential as a 4 track express line with plenty of local stops, (it is very tough to upgrade a line once it is built). Of course in a better world the federal government would be as interested in building transit infrastructure as it was in building the interstate network for cars or in military spending for fuel.

But even a 2 track subway would go a low way to relieving congestion on the 4/5/6 line, which is really the point of the 2nd ave. subway, yes?

I work freelance, but always dread when I take a job that requires me to take the 4 train. It's just so crowded as to be uncivilized. Somtimes I have to step back and let a train or two go by before one come in that I can actually get into.

ZippyTheChimp

November 20th, 2003, 02:41 PM

I think green22's point is that the widely spaced stops are due to no separate express/local tracks. If the cars are going to fill up anyway, what is needed is maximum passenger movement, and the fewer stations, the more trains you can run.

Ironic, since one of the NYC subway innovations was four track routes.

TonyO

November 20th, 2003, 03:02 PM

It sounds reasonable, practical, to keep this line simple. However the fact remains if they are going to go to the trouble of making that line - they should do it right. Why spend nearly 1 billion burying West Street for a few blocks? With that cash they could upgrade this project, or even provide the JFK rail link from the new main terminal downtown.

TLOZ Link5

November 20th, 2003, 05:15 PM

They could dig an express tunnel on a lower level, I would think. Plus the line branches in two at 63rd Street.

dchui

November 20th, 2003, 11:19 PM

It sounds reasonable, practical, to keep this line simple. However the fact remains if they are going to go to the trouble of making that line - they should do it right. Why spend nearly 1 billion burying West Street for a few blocks? With that cash they could upgrade this project, or even provide the JFK rail link from the new main terminal downtown.

It would cost a LOT more than $1 billion to make any significant upgrades to the current 2nd Ave subway plans or to bring a JFK link to Downtown.

Clarknt67

November 21st, 2003, 12:51 PM

It sounds reasonable, practical, to keep this line simple. However the fact remains if they are going to go to the trouble of making that line - they should do it right. Why spend nearly 1 billion burying West Street for a few blocks? With that cash they could upgrade this project, or even provide the JFK rail link from the new main terminal downtown.

It would cost a LOT more than $1 billion to make any significant upgrades to the current 2nd Ave subway plans or to bring a JFK link to Downtown.

no offence, but I'm also not sure that it's useful to pit one community project against another. Granted there are limited munciple funds to finance them. But if you ask upper east side residents what's more important 2nd ave. subway or tunneling the west side highway? I'm sure you'd get a different answer than you'd get from Lower Manhattan residents.

It's the big picture that counts, and both projects have their merits as they relate to the evolution of New york City and they can be financed from different budgets.

BrooklynRider

November 21st, 2003, 03:07 PM

[quote=dchui]... It's the big picture that counts, and both projects have their merits as they relate to the evolution of New york City and they can be financed from different budgets.

I agree with the "big picture" concept. However, I feel that the enhancement of public transit in NYC with a Second Avenue Subway, Extension of the 7 Train, Downtown and Midtown Access for the LIRR, and Direct Rail links to JFK and LaGuardia weakens an argument for a West Street Tunnel. We need to discourage and diminish car traffic in the city, not hide it. The best way to do it is to build effective public transit that counters the argument that "it is easier to drive there".

Clarknt67

November 21st, 2003, 07:55 PM

[quote=dchui]... It's the big picture that counts, and both projects have their merits as they relate to the evolution of New york City and they can be financed from different budgets.

I agree with the "big picture" concept. However, I feel that the enhancement of public transit in NYC with a Second Avenue Subway, Extension of the 7 Train, Downtown and Midtown Access for the LIRR, and Direct Rail links to JFK and LaGuardia weakens an argument for a West Street Tunnel. We need to discourage and diminish car traffic in the city, not hide it. The best way to do it is to build effective public transit that counters the argument that "it is easier to drive there".

Agreed, but new york will always have car traffic. No amount of public transportation will convince some suburbanites to give up the car keys. Driving their own car is a lifestyle to these people just as taking the subway is for City folk. There will always be heavy traffic on the west side highway with people coming and going from monteclair, fort lee CT or wherever. It's just a fact of life. the tunnel would minimize their impact on the city.

Ninjahedge

December 3rd, 2003, 10:47 AM

One thing I have noticed, though, about the whole commuting thing that has me all pissed off.

There seems to be a hell of a lot of places where you can pick up a subway into the city. It is the biggest system in the WORLD for that. But a lot of the areas out in Brooklyn and Queens are not exactly right on top of these areas.

Agreed there are busses to take you over to the station, but that is a PITA and a waste of time.

What would be nice would be some way to drive to the nearest station (from a suburb in Queens or LI) and park there for less than it costs to adopt an ethiopian family of 12. If you want people to leave their cars OUT of the city, you have to make it easier for them to do so.

Build big state parking facilities at the express stops and try to re-engineer the schedules to get the people from where they are to where they want to be as fast as possible.

The quicker you get them there, the less people will be ON the system at one time, reducing congestion....

How to do this, i do not know, but there has to be a better way than this.

Clarknt67

December 3rd, 2003, 10:56 AM

It would be a really good idea to build massive parking lots (at least partially underground) in the outskirts of Queens and Brooklyn near major subway stops. commuters could pay a nominal fee for parking or I have an even better plan. If your metrocard shows you road the subway or bus in the city by the time you pick up your car in the evening, that would make your parking fee gratis. I bet we'd see a lot less cars in manhattan. Similar lots could be built in Bronx and near Jersey path trains.

TLOZ Link5

December 3rd, 2003, 11:26 AM

You mean like park and ride facilities?

Ninjahedge

December 3rd, 2003, 06:01 PM

Exactly like Park and Ride.

Hoboken has the same parking problem. But Hoboken is not the best place to ride in from anyway, being so close to both tunnels (the traffic gets really bad).

Jersey city is not much better.

I think an extension to the path system may be in order to try to get the people coming into the city focused in areas that have the capacity to get them in and out. Having a park and ride on the Parkway (Ironically enough) is probably better than having it right by the entrance to the Lincoln Tunnel...

Kris

December 20th, 2003, 08:08 AM

December 20, 2003

New Report Advocates Subway Line for East Side

By PAUL von ZIELBAUER

An influential regional planning group issued a study yesterday that focused on the economic benefits of building a Second Avenue subway line while criticizing another study, released last month, that played down the relative worth of building it.

Standing in front of City Hall yesterday morning, several prominent city, state and Congressional Democrats made it clear that they trusted the new study, by the Regional Plan Association, more than last month's more critical report by the Partnership for New York City, a group representing some of the city's largest employers.

"The partnership is a partnership with the wrong people if they're not with us," said Representative Charles B. Rangel of Harlem, long an advocate for a subway line that would connect part of his district with Chinatown. "I can't wait to have them at the next press conference to explain this misunderstanding."

Beside Representative Rangel were Sheldon Silver, the State Assembly speaker; Gifford Miller, the City Council speaker; and Representative Carolyn B. Maloney, whose district includes the Upper East Side.

In its November study, the partnership said a Second Avenue subway would take 17 years to build and cost nearly $2.7 billion more than the economic development benefits it would create. The study, completed for the partnership by independent consultants, advocated focusing on other large projects, like building a transit hub in Lower Manhattan, extending the No. 7 subway line or relocating Pennsylvania Station.

The Regional Plan Association's study disputed those findings. It said the subway project could be completed in 12 years, not 17, and would create 7 million square feet of commercial development, not the 3.5 million the partnership's study forecast. The association also calculated nearly $1.3 billion in saved time and productivity resulting from a less crowded Lexington Avenue subway line; the partnership estimated a $971 million savings.

"No other project will bring more people to the Lower East Side than the Second Avenue subway," Mr. Silver said yesterday, referring to his own Assembly district. "It's time to get on with it."

Kathryn S. Wylde, the partnership's president, acknowledged in an interview that it might make economic sense to build a part of the proposed subway line, but that other projects would create more development and help more people.

"It's great to advocate for these improvements," she said. "Somebody's got to figure out how to pay for them."

Referring to Mr. Rangel, Mr. Silver and the other Democrats who are against her group's recommendations, Ms. Wylde added: "They're making a political case for the Second Avenue subway. We're looking at the ridership of the future, which doesn't have a voice to speak for it."

Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

Kris

January 20th, 2004, 08:19 PM

MTA To Build Second Avenue Subway In Stages, Rather Than All At Once

JANUARY 20TH, 2004

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority now says it could have part of the long-awaited Second Avenue subway up and running much earlier than expected.

MTA officials said Tuesday they have decided to build the line segment by segment, rather than building the entire line all at once.

The whole 8.5-mile line would ultimately run from 125th Street in East Harlem down to Hanover Square in Lower Manhattan. However, after meeting today with federal officials expected to provide much of the funding, MTA officials now say they'll start small.

They haven't decided yet which section will be built first.

“There may be at least two or three of them that can be done by 2012, so we don’t know which one of them is going to be the first one,” said Mysore Nagaraja of MTA Capital Construction.

An environmental impact study on the project is due by April, with construction set to begin before the end of the year.

The entire line is expected to cost $17 billion, and won't be complete until the year 2020.

There already is a park n ride on the Parkway, it's called Metro Park and it hosts Amtrak and NJ Transit trains.

Park n Rides are mainly for Commuter rail lines, rather than transit systems because transit systems are "too" close to the region's core.

Ninjahedge

January 21st, 2004, 03:25 PM

I know, but where is there one in Forest Hills?

DougGold

January 21st, 2004, 06:10 PM

I love New York City, and want to see this subway get done, but c'mon, $17 billion? Does anyone have any concept of what $17 billion dollars is? Is it really worth it to make life convenient for the people that live on the east side? How many people is that--a million? That's $17,000 of convenience per person! Just buy every one of them a Segway and we'll save a lot of money.

TLOZ Link5

January 21st, 2004, 10:01 PM

Opponents of Houston's new light-rail service said the money spent to build it could have bought all potential users a Lexus :P

The idea of mass transit is to reduce traffic, not add to it by buying everyone their own motorized vehicle.

dbhstockton

January 21st, 2004, 10:27 PM

Some people have no sense of perspective. Yes, you could buy everyone a Segway or a Lexus, as the case may be (regardless of traffic consequences), but how long would they last? 5-10 years tops, then you'll need to replace them. Not to mention the opportunity cost of letting high-density development --the most lucrative kind when it comes to tax revenue per infrastructure dollar-- continue to go to other municipalities. But I'll admit it's different on 2nd avenue because the high-density development is already there. I guess it'll allow even more.

It does boggle the mind, though, how expensive it is to build anything in Manhattan. It just doesn't seem right. Is it the unions? Red-tape? Plain-old corruption?

Zoe

January 22nd, 2004, 10:39 AM

The unions most definitely play a large role in why things cost so much in the city. Insurance, attorneys and other cover-your-a__ costs make up another large chunk of these incredible prices.

STT757

January 22nd, 2004, 11:46 AM

Digging underground in older Cities is VERY EXPENSIVE.

Just look at Boston's Central Artery (Big Dig) project, $14 Billion.

TonyO

January 22nd, 2004, 12:31 PM

If high costs were the dealbreaker for anything happening in Manhattan (or other large cities), everyone would live in the sticks. The subway hasn't expanded in years while the population has grown - its just natural that the subway needs to expand.

Parallel this with the 3rd water tunnel coming into the city. Its long-range planning that keeps things moving here.

dbhstockton

January 22nd, 2004, 01:48 PM

Digging underground in older Cities is VERY EXPENSIVE.

Just look at Boston's Central Artery (Big Dig) project, $14 Billion.

Yeah, but isn't the scope of the Big Dig many times greater than the 2nd ave. subway? It's a six-lane highway underground, correct?

STT757

January 22nd, 2004, 05:17 PM

Yeah, but isn't the scope of the Big Dig many times greater than the 2nd ave. subway? It's a six-lane highway underground, correct?

True the Big Dig project is much more complicated and had more features than the SAS, but it was also started 10+ years ago. The Second ave subway is yet to get a shovel in the ground yet, each year the project's costs go up.

billyblancoNYC

January 23rd, 2004, 02:22 AM

"The project spans 7.8 miles of highway" - http://www.bigdig.com/thtml/summary.htm

How long is the subway?

TonyO

January 23rd, 2004, 10:53 AM

"8.5 miles of new track along the length of Manhattan's East Side, from 125th Street to Hanover Square."

The big dig is/was WAY more complicated than the SAS, first of all the Second ave Subway does not go under water. And second it's virtually a straight line for most of the line under Second Ave, with some segments already completed.

The Big dig includes the Ted Williams Tunnel to Logan Airport, and then a bridge to Charlestown.

http://www.bigdig.com/thtml/images/mainmap.gif

The SAS is costing more because they are taking their sweet time deciding whether to build it or not, they need to start constuction by next year or it's costs are really get to the point where the Feds will say no to providing any funding.

TLOZ Link5

January 23rd, 2004, 05:34 PM

If high costs were the dealbreaker for anything happening in Manhattan (or other large cities), everyone would live in the sticks. The subway hasn't expanded in years while the population has grown - its just natural that the subway needs to expand.

Parallel this with the 3rd water tunnel coming into the city. Its long-range planning that keeps things moving here.

That's not entirely true that the subway station hasn't been expanded in years. The most recent expansions was in 1988, when the E, J and Z (I think) were extended to Archer Avenue; and 1989, when the 63rd Street extension was finished. Of course, there was also the reopening of the Franklin Avenue subway in 1999, as well as the addition of the AirTrain.

BTW, I've said this before, but the SAS is going to be classified as the T Train if and when it is finished.

Zoe

January 23rd, 2004, 11:10 PM

The 63rd extension did not fully open up until 2001 when the F train was re-routed thru Queens to Roosevelt Island and then on to mid-town. That was the same time that the V train was introduced.

ube

January 24th, 2004, 03:05 AM

I know this had been said before, and because of cost it would be ludicrous at this juncture, but lets big dig the FDR !!!!! :)

Kris

January 24th, 2004, 05:43 AM

I know this had been said before, and because of cost it would be ludicrous at this juncture, but lets big dig the FDR !!!!! :)
Yeah! And the Gowanus! And the Cross-Bronx!

Gulcrapek

January 24th, 2004, 12:39 PM

The Gowanus is being considered for tunneling...

ZippyTheChimp

January 24th, 2004, 01:19 PM

Because they can't shut down the Gowanus and divert traffic to the streets, or build a new one parallel, a rebuild of the elevated would have to be constructed a lane at a time. A tunnel is being seriously considered because it may actually be cheaper and faster to build.

And it has community support.

Third Ave minus the Gowanus would be one of the widest streets in Brooklyn.

Gulcrapek

January 24th, 2004, 01:26 PM

And maybe catalyze revitalization of the area, and I don't mean the Loews finishing up. It's more a degradation.

TonyO

January 24th, 2004, 10:52 PM

That's not entirely true that the subway station hasn't been expanded in years. The most recent expansions was in 1988, when the E, J and Z (I think) were extended to Archer Avenue; and 1989, when the 63rd Street extension was finished. Of course, there was also the reopening of the Franklin Avenue subway in 1999, as well as the addition of the AirTrain.

Not anything major like the SAS. "Over the last 60 years, for a host of reasons, almost nothing significant has been done to expand the city's transit system."

from

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/25/nyregion/25TRAN.html

TLOZ Link5

January 25th, 2004, 04:15 AM

So is there literally no hope for the subway to LaGuardia? :(

tmg

March 30th, 2004, 12:41 PM

The Line That Time Forgot

They call the Second Avenue subway the greatest New York project never built. They may have to think of a new name.

By Greg Sargent

Beloved, believed in, glimpsed fleetingly only to disappear again for decades, the Second Avenue subway has long seemed to be New York City’s version of the Loch Ness monster. The plan has been on the drawing board since the year Babe Ruth hit his first home run for the Yankees—that is to say, since 1920, when it was envisioned as part of a massive subway expansion that brought us the IND, the trains that now run under Sixth and Eighth avenues. But the Second Avenue subway was derailed by the Great Depression, and despite a string of vigorous efforts, the plan just never got back on track.

That, however, may be about to change. The Second Avenue subway is surfacing again, and this time the vision of a new line just may finally be realized.

The project is suddenly enjoying a perfect storm of favorable circumstances. Peter Kalikow, the MTA’s chairman, is committed to expanding the system in a way not seen since—well, not since Babe Ruth hit his first home run for the Yankees. Some of the money is already secured: The MTA has a quarter of the $4 billion or so it needs to launch the first leg. Meanwhile, federal officials are bullish on the plan, partly as a result of lobbying by Kalikow, a major GOP fund-raiser, and many believe the federal government will soon commit to paying at least a third of the first portion’s price tag.

Finally, a big political obstacle has been removed: Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, whose district is on the Lower East Side, is telling colleagues that he’s ready to support the plan even if the MTA decides to begin uptown. “I am flexible on doing stages as long as there’s the understanding that we’ll ultimately do a full build,” he says.

Sure, hurdles remain—it has to clear a final environmental review, and state and federal officials have to actually come up with the money, not just talk about it. But with Silver and Kalikow squarely behind the project, and consensus emerging among pols and civic groups (the Straphangers Campaign, the Regional Plan Association) on how and where to start it, the Second Avenue subway may be closer to reality than at just about any time during its tortured 84-year history.

“We can really build it in our lifetime,” says Mysore Nagaraja, the MTA’s chief engineer charged with overseeing construction. Nagaraja, a slight, bespectacled man with the calming presence of a pediatrician, often hears colleagues joke that he should take a long look at the sun now, because he may spend the next decade or so underground. “You may have a dream, but is it realistic?” Nagaraja wonders aloud. “This is realistic. It’s really buildable.”

With luck, and a last-minute burst of political will, the MTA could break ground as early as next year on the biggest subway expansion in 60 years.

If you want to know why the dream of a Second Avenue subway line has endured, take a ride on the 4 train at 8:30 a.m. on a workday. If MTA rush-hour stats are to be believed, you’ll be sharing a train car with around 180 commuters. While on the West Side there are two and sometimes more lines, on the East Side, the Lexington Avenue line has borne the burden alone since the Third Avenue El came down in the mid-fifties. On any given weekday, the Lex carries 1.5 million passengers, more daily riders than the metro systems in Washington, D.C., Boston, and Chicago—combined.

The Second Avenue subway would change that. The northern terminus would be at 125th Street and Lexington Avenue, allowing proximity to Metro-North, with its connections to Westchester. After traveling down Second Avenue, the line would fork at 65th Street. One line would curve west, to the F-train station at 63rd and Lexington, where it would join an already built tunnel linking to the Broadway N and R lines. The main stem, meanwhile, would continue down Second Avenue to the financial district. The cost of the entire project (which wouldn’t be complete till 2020) would be more than $17 billion, requiring construction of 16 new stations, as well as 28 sophisticated new trains that can travel closer together, thus easing congestion even further.

The MTA wants to build the line—which would ultimately be 8.5 miles long—in small, financially realistic stages. Although the MTA is considering other options, the first portion would likely start at 96th down to the 63rd Street station, where it would join the rest of the system.

The first leg will likely require the drilling of a shaft some seven stories deep into Manhattan at 96th Street and Second Avenue. Then a monstrous tunnel-boring machine—nicknamed “the Mole” by tunnel pros—would be lowered to the bottom. The Mole will inch forward, its spinning blades dislodging chunks of prehistoric bedrock—1.5 million cubic yards of it in phase one—after which the tunnel will be shored up with concrete lining.

The Mole is a technological breakthrough. It enables tunneling to go on far beneath the surface with little impact aboveground, unlike the old “cut and cover” technique, which tore up streets. “We can tunnel without disturbing buildings,” says Nagaraja. “People in the buildings won’t even feel it.”

That’s not to say there won’t be any serious disruptions. The drilling of the shaft would close a lane or two on Second Avenue in the Nineties. And then there are the new stations, which would be built inside existing buildings—not on sidewalks—meaning major problems for those who live or work in those structures. Whole shops are likely to vanish. You might want to drop by for a last look at the Food Emporium supermarket at 86th Street, or the Falk Drug and Surgical Supply store, at 72nd. They’ll likely be gone in a few years, condemned and replaced by state-of-the-art subway entrances. “It’s not a good feeling to think you have to leave the place you’ve been in for 50 years,” says Perry Falk, the drugstore owner. “This has been our home forever.”

And yet there appears to be little organized resistance thus far. “The subway is something that the overwhelming majority of East Siders want,” says Charles Warren, chairman of the Upper East Side’s Community Board 8. “The opposition we’ve seen so far is really to the location of stations, not to the project as a whole.”

The slow, fitful progress of the Second Avenue subway began on an early spring afternoon in 1925, in a park in Harlem, when New York’s mayor, a pasty-faced pol named John Hylan, raised a silver pickax above his head and plunged it into the sod beneath his feet.

He was breaking ground on phase one of a massive new IND subway system that would allow the city to tear down those nineteenth-century relics—elevated tracks—that blocked out sunlight from Manhattan’s major thoroughfares. The Second Avenue line would be phase two of this grand expansion.

Hylan hoped that his swing of the pickax would strike a great blow on behalf of the city’s people against their oppressors: the private companies that ran the IRT and what would become the BMT. Hylan called them “grasping transportation monopolies,” because they refused to risk profits expanding into new residential frontiers. The IND—the first municipally owned line—would challenge their hegemony.

Phase one was built during the mid-thirties, but cost overruns and the Great Depression postponed phase two. In 1941, the hated Second Avenue El was torn down, leading residents of Yorkville to parade in the streets. A new underground line couldn’t be far behind, it seemed—but World War II suspended all construction.

The Second Avenue subway landed on the front page of the Times in 1950 when Democrat Ferdinand Pecora made it an issue in his mayoral run. He lost, but subway overcrowding remained a popular fixation, and a year later, New Yorkers approved $500 million in government bonds for the project. Officials quietly spent most of the half-billion dollars on repairs. When news leaked that the money was gone and there was still no subway, a furor erupted. “It is highly improbable that the Second Avenue subway will ever materialize,” the Times lamented.

A decade later, with conditions on the Lex already intolerable, two men relaunched the project: Nelson Rockefeller and MTA chairman William Ronan, a self-styled Moses-like master builder. In 1972, Rockefeller, Ronan, Mayor John Lindsay, and a young congressman named Ed Koch journeyed to 102nd Street to break ground.

As reporters scribbled, Lindsay drily noted that in the twenties, “some people suggested a transit facility along Second Avenue. And it was such a good idea that I decided to follow up on it immediately.” The pols took their swings with a pickax—but in an uncanny piece of symbolism, none could dent the pavement. A worker with a power rig was called in to break the concrete.

To be sure, workers did build three segments of tunnel—between 99th and 105th streets, between 110th and 120th, and another downtown. But then the seventies fiscal crisis shelved the project yet again, and by the eighties, the MTA was running newspaper ads offering to rent the tunnels to private companies. “I remember being asked by a magazine, ‘What should we do with the excavations?’ ” Koch says. “I proposed growing mushrooms in them. Mushrooms need a dark interior.”

This legacy of failure has meant that New York, a city that prizes all things new and current, has a transit system that was last expanded around the time Paris fell to the Nazis. “The list of new mass-transit projects built in other world cities in recent decades is incredible,” says New York subway historian Clifton Hood. “But here, we’re still riding around on a system built by our great-grandparents.”

For the first time since Rockefeller and Ronan, the Second Avenue subway has two powerful patrons on the state level: Assembly Speaker Silver and MTA chairman Kalikow, a real-estate magnate who’s spent a career building big projects.

Silver has been widely hailed as a Second Avenue subway hero since 1999, the last time the MTA passed a five-year capital plan, when he threatened to block a host of big state projects unless funds for the line were included. The MTA put $1 billion in its budget—a substantial sum still waiting to be spent. Silver’s leverage is again at a maximum, because the MTA this winter will pass its next five-year plan, and Governor George Pataki wants to please his suburban base by funding East Side Access, a tunnel linking the LIRR to Grand Central Terminal. That gives Silver a chance to play let’s-make-a-deal with Pataki and, if necessary, do what he did last time: hold up other big projects—like East Side Access—to win another burst of state funds.

Kalikow, meanwhile, is the first MTA chairman in a generation who badly wants the project to happen; his recent predecessors were too busy rescuing the system from crime, graffiti, decay, and declining ridership. He has been aggressively lobbying (and throwing private fund-raisers for) U.S. senators like Richard Shelby and Patty Murray, who wield influence over transportation funds. Kalikow is engaged in other intricate behind-the-scenes politicking: He’s told colleagues that he may try to use $600 million in funds already earmarked for a train to La Guardia airport (a plan with an uncertain future) for the Second Avenue subway. That may lead to a clash with City Hall, which is likely to want the cash for extending the 7 line west.

There are reasons to be optimistic about the Feds. In a barely noticed development in February, the Federal Transit Administration put the plan on its short list of projects being considered for funding. That’s a big deal, because FTA money comes from a pot of federal dough separate from funds overseen by Republicans who are trying to rejigger transit funding to shaft the city. FTA bucks are less captive to partisan wrangling and actually tend to be doled out to projects based on the merits. The FTA likes the Second Avenue subway because it would serve more than 500,000 and has broad support among New York pols.

Kalikow vows that FTA funds are all but secured for the first leg. “I’m completely confident we will have funding from the federal government by the end of the year,” Kalikow says. If the FTA chips in at least $1.2 billion, and Silver secures another $1 billion, the MTA, with $1 billion already on hand, will be in striking distance.

“If the stars aren’t already aligned right now, they’re pretty damn close,” says Elliot Sander, a senior VP at DMJM+Harris, which would help build the first part.

The Second Avenue subway has its share of high-powered skeptics, to be sure. Michael Bloomberg, for instance, seems far more interested in the 7 line. And the Partnership for New York City, a group of 200 top CEOs, recently slammed the plan, arguing that the new line’s economic benefits didn’t justify its enormous cost.

“Outside of another politically untenable fare increase,” says Partnership CEO Kathryn Wylde, “the business community does not see where the money will come from to pay for the state’s share of projects such as the Second Avenue subway.”

Silver and Kalikow beg to differ.

The Second Avenue subway would alter life in East Side neighborhoods from Harlem down to Alphabet City. Residents would, for the first time, be spared the notorious trek to the Lex line that is known to real-estate brokers as “the walk.” As Regional Plan Association president Robert Yaro points out, the new subway would also grow the so-called hospital corridor—the big medical institutions along Second Avenue in the Twenties that are driving the city’s health-care industry.

It would transform the real-estate market. Pamela Liebman, CEO of the Corcoran Group, predicts it would produce an immediate jump of at least 10 percent in the value of apartments east of Second Avenue from the Nineties down to the Lower East Side. “It would open up the possibility of more luxury housing east of Second Avenue,” Liebman says. “It would stimulate commercial development the whole length of Second Avenue, bringing in a whole new wave of support services.”

Subway construction has often brought gentrification in its wake—the Sixth Avenue line sparked the long-term transformation of a low-slung working-class neighborhood into a wall of office towers—and the Second Avenue line would offer its own twist on the phenomenon. It would further inflate land values in upper-class Manhattan neighborhoods (notwithstanding the grumbling you occasionally hear in the luxe enclave of East End Avenue that the new line would bring in the sort of people current residents moved there to get away from). While some might find themselves priced out of Manhattan as a result, the new line could also stimulate economic development in low-income neighborhoods like Harlem and spur economic expansion in ways that, in the long run, might lift the whole city.

Just as the subways built from 1900 to 1940 shaped the city’s growth through the twentieth century, so a Second Avenue line built now, at the outset of the 21st, could help drive the city’s growth for the next hundred years. The city’s future could hinge on its ability to move people into its ever-expanding business district, and eventually, the Second Avenue line could even revert to its original purpose: a trunk line for a whole new train system. Some planners, thinking deep into the future, envision it as a jumping-off point for subways into neighborhoods in the eastern Bronx and possibly in central Brooklyn—the neighborhoods that could absorb the workforce of the future.

One person who’s thrilled by that prospect is Nagaraja, who’s looking to earn his place in the pantheon of great subway builders. At a celebration of the subway’s centennial, he found himself entranced by a large picture of William Parsons, builder of the first subway line. “One of the people who was with me commented that when they celebrate 200 years of subways, instead of Parsons’s picture, there will be your picture,” Nagaraja says, without a trace of irony. “I feel very proud of that.”

http://www.newyorkmetro.com/nymetro/news/features/n_10109//index.html

Clarknt67

April 1st, 2004, 12:43 PM

The Second Avenue subway is surfacing again

Wouldn't that make it an El? :wink:

Kris

April 12th, 2004, 02:43 PM

New York Daily News - http://www.nydailynews.com

2nd Ave. stubway for now

By PETE DONOHUE
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER

Sunday, April 11th, 2004

Transportation honchos plan to kick off the Second Ave. subway with a miniline that runs from 96th to 72nd Sts. and then shoots over to Broadway to bring passengers downtown, the Daily News has learned.

The project could be ready in as few as seven years.

"It makes the most sense," Metropolitan Transportation Authority Chairman Peter Kalikow told the Daily News. "When you are done with that, you have an operating segment that ties into other lines and gives great service over to Times Square and downtown."

Construction could start late this year on the first leg of the long-awaited project.

New stations would be built along Second Ave. at 96th, 86th and 72nd Sts. The line would then curve west - stopping at the 63rd St. and Lexington Ave. F line station, then run downtown along the existing Broadway tunnel.

The plan is included in documents submitted to the Federal Transit Administration. The proposal is expected to be released in the coming weeks, when the public can comment.

Officials have told the MTA it would be easier to get federal cash if the agency built the Second Ave. subway in segments so at least some service will be up and running.

The first segment would attract about 200,000 daily riders and bring much-needed relief to the overcrowded Lexington Ave. line, officials have said.

The next three segments would extend the line from 125th St. to Hanover Square. The entire project will cost about $17 billion and be completed around 2020.

The first part of the project will make life more difficult along the avenue before it makes it better.

There will be lane closures, construction noise and truck traffic. Some businesses and residents will be displaced, either temporarily or permanently, as station entrances would be inside buildings instead of on sidewalks.

"It's going to be a headache with the noise and people running around doing construction," said Philip Roman, an optician at E. 72nd St. and Second Ave.

There is a lot of uncertainty along the avenue, said Francesca Macaraaron, manager of Penang Restaurant at Second Ave. and E. 83rd St., which has an outdoor cafe.

"We may lose a whole season of the cafe and quite possibly the entire restaurant," Macaraaron said. "Quite frankly, we are concerned."

But Charles Warren, an area resident and Community Board 8 chairman, said, in general, the board and many East Siders believe the new line is desperately needed and, after some pain, will benefit the entire city.

Kris

April 27th, 2004, 01:44 AM

April 27, 2004

M.T.A. Expected to Ask for Proposals to Build First Stage of 2nd Ave. Subway

By MICHAEL LUO

The long-awaited Second Avenue subway is expected to clear another important milestone tomorrow, when the Metropolitan Transportation Authority's board approves the issuance of a request for proposals for building the project's first segment, from 96th Street to 63rd Street.

The approval would pave the way for a contractor to start work by December, although financing for the project has still not been finalized.

It is the financing - $3.8 billion for the first phase alone, and $16.8 billion for the project's full length, from East Harlem to Lower Manhattan - that supporters have been fretting over. An array of major transit projects are vying right now for limited city, state and federal funds. Their fates will be largely decided in the coming year, after state lawmakers approve the transportation authority's next capital program and the federal government weighs in how much money it will contribute.

But if the transportation authority wants to stay on schedule - officials are hoping to have the first phase ready for riders by 2011 - the board needs to approve the issuing of the request for proposals at its monthly meeting tomorrow, Mysore Nagaraja, president of the authority's Capital Construction Company, told a group of board members during a meeting of the board's Capital Construction Committee yesterday before the committee approved the issuance of the request. It now heads to the full board for its approval, usually a formality.

The Federal Transit Administration, which evaluates mass transit construction projects, is expected to announce its full support for the project next month with what is known as a record of decision, essentially the green light for a construction project to begin securing federal financing. Once that happens, transit officials said, the request for proposals can be sent out immediately.

The awarding of the contract, however, will be contingent on the transportation authority's lining up the financing it needs.

The planning phase of the project is essentially over, William M. Wheeler, the director of special project development and planning at the M.T.A., said yesterday. The Federal Transit Administration signed off earlier this month on the authority's final environment impact statement, which outlines plans for four construction phases over 16 years. The next step is to actually begin designing and building the first segment.

If completed, the Second Avenue subway, expected to carry 560,000 riders a day, would offer two lines of service, one down Second Avenue from 125th Street to Hanover Square, and the other connecting to the F line at 63rd Street, continuing on to the Broadway lines and eventually to Brooklyn.

Planners selected the 63rd-to-96th Street segment to be built first because it would benefit the most riders right away - 202,000 the day the line opens, Mr. Nagaraja said. The section of the Lexington Avenue line from 86th Street to Grand Central Terminal is the most overburdened right now. The first phase of the Second Avenue line would include new stations at 96th, 86th and 72nd Streets, and a connector to the 63rd Street station on the F line. It would also tie into the existing track for the Q line and allow a ride on to Brooklyn without having to change trains.

Building this section first would also allow the transportation authority to take advantage of tunnel segments for the Second Avenue subway that were built in the 1970's between 96th and 105th Streets, only to see their financing dry up. Those sections are in good condition, Mr. Nagaraja said, and would be used by the transportation authority to store trains at the northern end of the line.

Of the $3.8 billion needed for the first phase, $1.05 billion has already been allocated as part of the transportation authority's 2000-04 capital plan, and the federal government has committed $9 million. The remaining $2.8 billion, however, will have to come from the next capital program and the federal government. The draft of the next capital program will not be available until July and must then go to Albany in October for approval.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

billyblancoNYC

April 27th, 2004, 11:02 AM

NY Post...

http://www.nypost.com/news/regionalnews/23365.htm

April 27, 2004 -- Here's a sneak peek at what the Second Avenue subway will look like as the dream finally gets on track to becoming a reality.
The new T line will feature sleek, brightly lit stations equipped with climate-control ventilation and built with no columns along the platform, officials said yesterday.

"These will be 21st century stations," said Mysore Nagaraja, president of the MTA's Capital Construction Co. "There will be no columns, which will provide for better circulation of riders" on and off trains.

The two-track line will be built in "four phases" starting with a stretch along the Upper East Side that will allow for direct trips to Brooklyn.

The first phase of the 8.5-mile line will start at 96th Street - with stops at 86th, 72nd and 63rd streets - and veer west to 63rd Street/Lexington Avenue, where it will connect to the existing Broadway line.

The opening segment will ease overcrowding on the 4, 5 and 6 Lexington Avenue lines and attract an estimated 202,000 daily riders.

"The first section that we build will serve the most riders," Nagaraja said. "When we build this project, the people will already be there."

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority said construction would start at the end of this year.

The full-length line, which will run from 125th Street in East Harlem to Hanover Square in lower Manhattan, will cost $16.8 billion and is slated for completion by 2020.

The second segment - running from 125th Street to 96th Street - will use existing tunnels that were closed during the 1970s after financial problems forced the city to halt the project.

The third leg will run from 63rd Street to Houston Street, and the final piece will run from Houston Street to Hanover Square.

The line will also offer connections to the Lexington Avenue line at 125th Street and 42nd Street/Grand Central Station, the L at 14th Street and the B and D at Grand Street.

The Federal Transit Administration recommended the line be built in stages to make it easier for the MTA to secure funds for the project and enable riders to benefit from it as soon as possible.

The opening segment will cost $3.8 billion. The MTA has secured $1.8 billion so far from the state and federal government and hopes to get the rest by year's end.

TonyO

April 27th, 2004, 11:10 AM

Looks like DC's stations...very nice. 2011 seems so far off but this is an exciting project. Too bad there will be no express line but us on the east side will be very happy when it finally gets built.

Clarknt67

April 27th, 2004, 03:25 PM

Definately very good news.

I'm wondering what the reasoning is for not slating the 96-125th streets to run until Phase 2? If the tunnels are already there, as the article states, it seems like the hard part is done. They should lay the track and let the gentrification of East Harlem pick up speed. It could help slow the escalation of Manhattan real estate prices

It also seems TPTB are leaving themselves open to cries of racism (or classism), by making the streets above 96 st a "second priority."

Deimos

April 27th, 2004, 03:42 PM

They're only building 4 stops from 96th to 63rd St: 96, 86, 72, 63. Extending the line up to 125 will add stops at 106, 116 and 125. By splitting the line here, they are simply halving the initial construction costs, and attacking the line at the area where it's needed most first.

I'm wondering what the reasoning is for not slating the 96-125th streets to run until Phase 2?

ZippyTheChimp

April 27th, 2004, 03:46 PM

The 125 to 96 st segment only has connecting service at the northern end. The majority of morning commuters will be travelling south, and there will nothing to transfer to at 96 st.

The 96 to 63 st segment has connections at the southern end to existing subway service.

Kris

April 29th, 2004, 04:30 AM

April 29, 2004

METRO MATTERS

A Subway Line Is Suddenly a Bandwagon

By JOYCE PURNICK

IT took the board of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority about 65 seconds yesterday, give or take, to approve the latest step toward construction of the Second Avenue subway, a project around so long (bonds were first floated to pay for it in 1951) that it has become an urban legend.

"It's the most famous thing that's never been built in New York City,'' said Gene Russianoff, the staff lawyer at the Straphangers Campaign, an advocacy group for transit riders.

Now even skeptics are saying maybe this time, it will be built, at least a part of it. It's a hot topic, along with the East Side Access project, which would carry Long Island Rail Road passengers into Grand Central Terminal, as well as Pennsylvania Station on the West Side.

The transportation authority, whose officials have been known to be publicity-shy, has all but invited publicity on both projects. The fact that its board unanimously agreed yesterday to issue requests for proposals for building the first segment of the Second Avenue subway, from 96th to 63rd Streets, is only the latest indication of the project's exalted status.

Why the new push, beyond a desire to relieve crowding on the Lexington Avenue subway line? Politics, money and strategies to deal with the realities of both.

The M.T.A. is about to have a fiscal problem - big bills for maintenance and expansion, with limited sources of income unless the authority raises the base fare again, which is considered a political black hole. At the same time, it can only borrow so much because it is carrying a debt so large that just under 25 percent of its operational costs goes to debt payments.

What to do? Build a rationale and a constituency for more resources. That is clearly what the authority's leaders are up to, championing the two expansions not only on their merits, but also to focus attention. New York is seeing an updated version of the campaign Richard Ravitch mounted when, as the authority's chairman in the 1980's, he mobilized support for dedicated taxes and other charges that saved a badly deteriorated subway system.

Today it is a matter of maintenance and expansion. "It's a slightly bigger challenge because the system isn't breaking down, it isn't at a critical point, but this is critical too,'' said Katherine N. Lapp, the authority's executive director. "We need to make our needs known. It's up to elected officials to figure out how to provide those needs, whether through dedicated taxes or other sources.''

THE two projects - the Second Avenue subway and East Side Access plan - account for only about a quarter of those needs, but they crystallize the problem of uncertain financing. Peter S. Kalikow, the authority's chairman, says he is counting on the federal government to pay for half of the first phase of the Second Avenue subway, a seven-year, $3.8 billion project. Another $1 billion would come from the authority's current capital budget, and $1 billion from its next capital budget.

Mr. Kalikow is also expecting another $3 billion in federal transportation money for the $6.3 billion East Side Access project. That would be a total of $4.9 billion from the transportation bill that's now pending in Washington - the "New Starts" program, which is likely to amount to about $8 billion over six years, for the entire country.

New York could get a substantial piece of the total, but not as much as Mr. Kalikow predicts, some lawmakers said yesterday. That means the authority will need plenty of money from home, and not only for those projects. "We need to have a $20 billion capital plan, at a minimum, of which $15 billion will be for purchase of new cars and system upgrades, $5 billion for expansion,'' Mr. Kalikow said yesterday. "Letting the system slide is not an option. We expect the states, cities and counties we serve to be real, no-fooling-around partners.''

One of those partners is the powerful Democratic Assembly speaker, Sheldon Silver. The shape of the authority's next capital budget is decided in Albany. Mr. Silver, who represents the Lower East Side, is a big fan of the Second Avenue subway, which he sees as some day benefiting his constituents. He is another reason for the sudden attention on construction of that subway line. It is a bargaining chip.

Mr. Kalikow predicts that construction on the first leg of the fabled Second Avenue subway could begin in December. Maybe it really will, given its political utility.

Nearly 400 people who live in the intended path of the East Side line are just now discovering they may lose their homes to the wrecking ball.

"I'm shaking. I'm scared," said Giorgio Costa, a cook who has lived at the corner of 69th St. and Second Ave. for more than 30 years and recently learned his building is doomed.

"What am I going to do?" Costa asked.

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority plans to knock down about 30 apartment buildings, many with rent-controlled and rent-stabilized units, to build station entrances, ventilation shafts and other parts of the mega-project, according to a recently released MTA report.

Eleanor Gorczycki, who lives near Costa, has lost about 40 pounds since last summer worrying about her future.

"This is my home," said Gorczycki, a 66-year-old retired businesswoman. "It's where my friends are. This is where my doctors are. I don't want to move ... and I can't afford an apartment that is market rate."

The study says the agency will follow federal law and help an estimated 372 tenants who will be displaced - including finding apartments for them that are comparable in size and cost.

But the study also notes that it "may be difficult, if not impossible" to find comparable rent-controlled or rent-stabilized apartments "because of the relative shortage of such available units in N.Y.C."

The MTA may have to hand out cash to the evicted tenants, the study says.

"It's really very tough and very scary," said Gorczycki. "I just don't know what is going to happen."

A longtime dream of subway riders and urban planners, the new line will stretch from 125th St. to the southern tip of Manhattan.

Construction on the first phase - including stations at 96th, 86th and 72nd Sts. - is set to begin this year and wrap up in 2011.

Relocation of residents in the first stage is at least a year away, MTA spokesman Tom Kelly said.

"Each case will be taken on an individual basis, and we will make every effort to accommodate everyone's needs, keeping in mind the public benefits for hundreds of thousands of our customers whose lives this project will make easier," Kelly added.

"As the plan has been fine-tuned, we have gone from a much higher number of displacements to a smaller number, and we hope that it will get even smaller."

Property acquisitions also will take space now used by about 80 businesses employing more than 500 workers.

TonyO

May 6th, 2004, 12:56 PM

This from the announcement of a new tunnel for LIRR access to JFK.

"The boring of this tunnel will create the capacity to extend additional rail lines - such as the Second Avenue subway and existing services such as the E train - across the East River from their endpoints in Lower Manhattan to Brooklyn and beyond," Mr. Pataki said.

Already being considered for expansion into Brooklyn. Maybe the Bronx end will be next?

TLOZ Link5

May 6th, 2004, 01:14 PM

I feel bad for people who will lose their homes, but this project is a necessity—very badly needed. The next thing that needs to be done is to have an actual, official regional plan for the region.

Kris

May 6th, 2004, 03:11 PM

http://rpa.org/projects/transportation/metrolink.html

BrooklynRider

May 7th, 2004, 09:59 AM

This 2nd Ave Subway / JFK Link, Hudson River Park and Brooklyn Waterfront Park / Queens Watefrfront Development are the most exciting and beneficial projects the city can pursue on behalf of its citizens.

Kris

May 16th, 2004, 03:50 PM

May 16, 2004

NEW YORK TRANSIT/EAST SIDE

A Not-Yet Train With a Quite Real Name

By JEFF VANDAM

This much is true: If the Second Avenue subway is ever built, number-loving East Siders may be disappointed.

In artists' renderings and on official-looking maps, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority has already designated a label for the perennially unfinished line, which has a few tunnels dug for it, though construction was halted in 1975 for lack of funds: the letter T. Though the color of the circle behind it varies from sky blue to lime green, the question is whether the M.T.A. has officially named the line.

"Well, no, that was for planning purposes," said John McCarthy, an M.T.A. spokesman, when asked whether T was the letter of choice. "I don't think that's a decision that's been made."

Still, the line will definitely bear a letter, he said. The new subway will fall under the "B Division," containing all lettered lines, which have wider cars than their numbered counterparts.

Yet a letter-only policy leaves few viable options. Of the nine letters not currently in use, T may seem an obvious choice, until you consider that the Boston subway system is already called that. The I? Well, people might confuse it with the 1. The X?

"X isn't a letter that I would want to use," said Charles Seaton, a spokesman for New York City Transit, a division of the M.T.A. "The X Train," he said, testing it out. "I don't know. We use Z already."

They used T already too, in the 1960's. It was called the West End line, and traveled express along the modern-day D route.

Until 1985, there were several double-lettered local trains, like the HH, the JJ and even the TT. But then, Mr. Seaton said, "somebody got the idea that the trains would be easier to keep track of if they just gave every train its own letter."

For the time being, the letter T should stick. Subway planners chose it because "it's an unused letter, and it doesn't sound like anything else," Mr. Seaton said.

Others have already turned their thoughts away from what to call the line.

"I don't spend my time daydreaming about the T or the X," said Gene Russianoff of the Straphangers Campaign. "I find myself thinking, 'How do they get the money to make this thing happen?' "

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

krulltime

June 30th, 2004, 09:20 AM

2ND AVE. SUBWAY WILL WIPE OUT SIDEWALK CAFES

By CLEMENTE LISI
June 30, 2004

Eating outdoors along part of the Upper East Side could be a thing of the past, as portions of sidewalks will be taken over to make room for the construction of the Second Avenue subway, officials said yesterday.

The MTA board will approve a measure today allowing it to start the process of attaining temporary control of 20 spots currently occupied by sidewalk cafes, bike racks, planters and cellars to make room for construction equipment.

"Seems like I can't do anything about it at this point," said Alexander Moon, 58, who owns Bagel Express on 93rd Street and Second Avenue, which has an outdoor seating area. "People like to sit outside."

The spaces could be off limits for as long as five years once construction of the new 8.5-mile line begins in December.

"We will need the space during the construction phase," said MTA spokesman Tom Kelly.

The agency will negotiate with the owners, but said it would use the state's eminent-domain law to evict them.

Owners were upset about losing sidewalk space and having to deal with nearby construction.

"It's a huge part of our business," said Steve Galanis, who owns Cinema Café on Second Avenue at the corner of 70th Street. "People may not want to go inside . . . with work going on outside."

Dozens of other businesses could be permanently taken over down the line as tunneling work proceeds and stations are built.

The Post reported last month that the Metropolitan Transportation Authority had sent letters to business owners telling them their properties could be taken over to make way for the $16.8 billion line.

Copyright 2004 NYP Holdings, Inc.

NYatKNIGHT

June 30th, 2004, 10:05 AM

That's the obvious downside of large construction projects. Still, five years sounds a little long for any one spot to be disrupted. It will definitely have an impact; few avenues in the city are more lively than 2nd Avenue, with restaurants and bars practically the whole length.

TonyO

July 9th, 2004, 05:27 PM

New York Daily News

Eying 20B fixup down tracks

BY PETE DONOHUE
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER
Friday, July 9th, 2004

Transit officials will propose a record-high capital program of at least $20 billion, with big bucks going to system expansion projects like the Second Ave. subway, the Daily News has learned.

But the core of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority's five-year program, which will be unveiled at month's end, will be on nuts-and-bolts items to keep the system reliable, transit officials told The News.

That involves everything from track replacement, signal upgrades and station rehabs to new subways, buses and commuter rail cars.

That's critical, said Gene Russianoff of the Straphangers Campaign, who predicted the plan would come in several billion dollars higher.

"It determines whether you are on a train where the air-conditioning works, that doesn't break down ... and whether you get off at a station that looks decent as opposed to a chamber of horrors," Russianoff said.

Several hundred million dollars in additional funds for securing the system against terrorist attacks also will be in the plan, officials said.

A pet project of former Mayor Rudy Giuliani, extending subway service to LaGuardia Airport, is being scrapped, freeing up some $600 million for other options.

The MTA's current capital program, when first proposed in 1999, was $17.5 billion. It grew to about $19 billion with amendments to increase spending for security and planned projects that emerged after the 2001 terrorist attack - including the Fulton Transit Center and new South Ferry subway station, both of which are to be fully funded by the feds.

How the program will be funded is still to be worked out. The state Legislature, which officials hope will provide a new revenue source, such as a dedicated tax, is not in session. Transit advocates want the state and the city, which have reduced their contributions over the years, to step up their commitment.

The current plan relies heavily on borrowing through bond sales.

krulltime

July 14th, 2004, 11:20 AM

CO-OP FIGHTS MTA PLAN FOR NEW STATION

July 14, 2004

A posh Upper East Side building has hired architects to counter the MTA's plans to take over part of their property to house a Second Avenue subway entrance, The Post has learned.

The tenants of 301 E. 69th St. have come up with "other options" to the Metropolitan Transportation Authority's plan to partially condemn their building.

The MTA plans to take over the northeast corner of East 69th Street and Second Avenue.

When complaints to the MTA fell on deaf ears, the co-op's board hired Ross and Bertolini architects to draw up other plans.

They have proposed placing an entrance on the southwest or northwest corner instead.

Clemente Lisi

Copyright 2004 NYP Holdings, Inc.

Clarknt67

July 20th, 2004, 01:45 PM

CO-OP FIGHTS MTA PLAN FOR NEW STATION
They have proposed placing an entrance on the southwest or northwest corner instead.

Do you supposed this solution is preferable to tenants and homeowners of the SW &amp; NW corners?

It's funny to me how often people consider public policy and works with only the myopic viewpoint of how it affects them personally.

The chairman of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority said today that he would be willing to jettison ambitious expansion projects, like the Second Avenue subway, if it were necessary to save the agency's five-year, $17.2 billion core capital program for maintaining the existing transit system.

The chairman, Peter S. Kalikow, said he hoped that state legislators and Gov. George E. Pataki would realize the need to maintain the current system as well as pay for expansion projects, including the new subway line and a link between the Long Island Rail Road and Grand Central Terminal, but acknowledged that that might be impossible.

In an interview with reporters at the authority's Midtown headquarters, Mr. Kalikow made clear that his top priority would be to keep the city's subways, buses and commuter rails in good condition - particularly if state leaders refuse to raise taxes and fees to support the authority.

"I'm O.K. with that, $17 billion for the state of good repair," Mr. Kalikow said. "I'll accept that. I think they're wrong. I think it's foolhardy and shortsighted, but I would accept that."

The comments by Mr. Kalikow, who has been chairman since 2001, were a striking acknowledgment of the political realities facing the authority, which is asking Albany for new revenue to fill a $16 billion gap in the authority's next capital plan. And it also reflected a new level of brinkmanship between the M.T.A. chairman, who has been pressing for more state help for the system, and the governor, who controls the M.T.A. and who appointed Mr. Kalikow.

Mr. Pataki has declared his support for various capital plans, including a rail link that would connect Kennedy International Airport with Lower Manhattan, but neither the governor nor the leaders of the Legislature have gone along with a package of tax increases that Mr. Kalikow proposed. Paying for capital projects like the Second Avenue subway, an airport rail link and the Grand Central Terminal connection to Long Island would add nearly $11 billion to the capital plan.

Mr. Kalikow's comments were the latest twist in the tortured history of the Second Avenue subway, a dream of urban planners since the same avenue's elevated line was demolished in 1942. Construction on the line was abandoned during the city's fiscal crisis of the mid-1970's.

To pay for the authority's capital needs, Mr. Kalikow has proposed tax increases that would provide the authority with about $850 million a year, enough to pay annual debt service on new bonds that would be issued to fill the capital financing gap. But the state would have to authorize those tax increases.

The authority's current five-year capital plan expires next week, on Dec. 31. The proposed plan for 2005 to 2009, totaling $27.7 billion, is now before the Capital Program Review Board, a panel that includes representatives of the governor, the heads of the two chambers of the Legislature and the mayor of New York City.

Mr. Kalikow has warned that the next year may be similar to 1975, when a fiscal crisis forced the authority to halt spending on basic maintenance. The system hit its nadir years later, in the winter of 1980-81, when service was delayed or eliminated altogether because of widespread equipment failures.

"If we don't have the full $17 billion core program, you can write down: 2005 is the day the system reached its zenith, and is now starting its descent," Mr. Kalikow said.

The person given the most credit for the system's recovery is Richard Ravitch, the authority's charismatic chairman from 1979 to 1983, who persuaded Gov. Hugh L. Carey and state lawmakers to pay for a general revitalization of the system.

"Everybody in government in the early 80's had lived through the 70's and knew how really bad it was," recalled Mr. Kalikow, who is 62. "Our problem is that there's a whole generation of New Yorkers that has now grown up and used the system that don't remember when it was horrible."

He said that raising taxes, as the state faces major increases in education and health care spending, would require political will.

"We need to remember that the leaders we have today are no less able, are no less bright, are no less visionary," Mr. Kalikow said. "We need to get them to say, Not only do we think it needs to be done, but if there's political capital to be expended, we're willing to expend it."

Mr. Kalikow suggested that he was frustrated when Mr. Pataki and the Senate majority leader, Joseph L. Bruno, said they were unwilling to raise taxes to pay for the authority's capital program.

"I was disappointed but not surprised," Mr. Kalikow said, "because I know the governor pretty well and I know his abhorrence of taxes."

Mr. Kalikow said he and the authority's executive director, Katherine N. Lapp, have been meeting with business leaders to explain the importance of the transit network to the regional economy.

"The system is very delicate and if we don't support it with these capital plans it will deteriorate, and it will deteriorate very quickly," he said. "A result of deterioration is rider falloff, and rider falloff in a city of this economic vibrancy will cause havoc on the streets."

Robert D. Yaro, the president of the Regional Plan Association, an urban planning group that supports expansion of the region's transportation infrastructure, said he was struck by the forcefulness of Mr. Kalikow's remarks about the capital program's needs.

"This is a cri de coeur from Peter," Mr. Yaro said. "He came forward with a very bold financing strategy and he hasn't heard a response from Albany, which isn't atypical. Peter has done the bold thing in making it very clear that this has to be a front-burner issue."

Governor Pataki is on vacation and not available for comment, but a spokeswoman repeated his opposition to raising taxes. "The governor is an ardent opponent of tax increases and would like to explore other ways of meeting the M.T.A.'s capital needs," the spokeswoman, Lynn Rasic, said in declining to discuss what those other ways might be.

NewYorkYankee

December 21st, 2004, 08:53 PM

Do you guys think that the subway system will ever go into another downfall? Im afraid for it to, its the backbone to this city. :(

Bob

December 21st, 2004, 09:32 PM

Build, build, build!

And...to help pay for it, might I suggest differential pricing, as is done on the Washington Metro system? This way, those who choose to use the new 2nd Avenue line would have to pay a premium to do so, helping to defray the costs of construction.

ryan

December 21st, 2004, 11:01 PM

Why focus perilously limited resources on building a subway through a prosperous area? I think the money would be better spent a) maintaining current infrastructure and avoiding any decline b) paying off the mta's debt so it's more financially stable or c) extending subway service to the west side to encourage development. In that order.

billyblancoNYC

December 21st, 2004, 11:30 PM

Why focus perilously limited resources on building a subway through a prosperous area? I think the money would be better spent a) maintaining current infrastructure and avoiding any decline b) paying off the mta's debt so it's more financially stable or c) extending subway service to the west side to encourage development. In that order.

B/c the 4/5/6 lines are too crowded to support the most densely populated are of NYC. Furthermore, if the line is built, there would be a BOOM on York, 1st, and 2nd avenues that will not happen with people having the "I don't want to walk too far Lexington" stigma. The city needs to maintain and improve what we have AND expand. The 7 train to the West Side would not be financed by the MTA but by the city, so that's no an issue.

debris

December 21st, 2004, 11:31 PM

So shortsighted it makes me sick. There is no leader in New York right now who doesn't understand how important this is. And no one is going to step up to the plate, especially Pataki, because raising taxes is political suicide. Especially tolling the East River bridges, which is only logical from a congestion pricing POV. Even though its the right thing to do, and even though getting rid of these projects will kill us 20 years from now. I can't believe this is the same state the created the Erie Canal, the subway system, all those highways. I guess you have to look to Shanghai for that now... :(

billyblancoNYC

December 21st, 2004, 11:46 PM

So shortsighted it makes me sick. There is no leader in New York right now who doesn't understand how important this is. And no one is going to step up to the plate, especially Pataki, because raising taxes is political suicide. Especially tolling the East River bridges, which is only logical from a congestion pricing POV. Even though its the right thing to do, and even though getting rid of these projects will kill us 20 years from now. I can't believe this is the same state the created the Erie Canal, the subway system, all those highways. I guess you have to look to Shanghai for that now... :(

It's also the state with a $100Billion budget and the city with a $50Billion budget. Taxes and spending need to be cut. It's getting to be a real sinking ship. How much more can you tax and spend without having everyone say "**** this."

ryan

December 21st, 2004, 11:50 PM

Financing the operating expenses of the mta with debt is shortsighted. I agree that expanding the system is needed, and I would support it 100% if it were funded responsibly. I think the mta's capital construction plan makes complete sense... except the finances.

I agree completely about tolling the east side bridges, and I would go a step further with the midtown congestion toll that's been talked around. Idiots who drive into the city should subsidize public transportation.

TLOZ Link5

December 22nd, 2004, 12:19 PM

London's done exactly that in the city center. I'm not certain if the money goes to public transportation, but still, why can't we?

BPC

December 22nd, 2004, 04:45 PM

Not to beat a dead horse, but this taxes vs. bonds debate is one we need not yet reach. The Governor is still sitting on a billion dollars of federal 9/11 transit funds which he has set aside for a West Street tunnel. The only restrictions on these funds is that they have to be used Downtown and on transit. They could easily be assigned to construct the southernmost leg of the Second Aenue Subway, from Hanover Square to the Seaport, and possibly the second leg to Chathan Square.

http://www.mta.nyc.ny.us/capconstr/sas/pdf/overview8_18_03.pdf

TonyO

January 19th, 2005, 04:43 PM

NYTimes
January 19, 2005

Pataki's Budget Leaves Transit Projects in Doubt

By AL BAKER and SEWELL CHAN

ALBANY, Jan. 18 - Gov. George E. Pataki proposed a $105.5 billion budget on Tuesday that would dedicate increases in taxes and fees to mass transit but leave in doubt the future of such major projects as the Second Avenue subway and Long Island Rail Road access to Grand Central Terminal.

While the governor proposed spending $15.2 billion over five years to maintain the New York region's subways, buses and commuter railroads, he proposed ways to pay for only three years and suggested that the higher taxes and fees would pay for $3 billion of the total amount. He said he hoped that federal aid, private assistance and "innovative financing mechanisms" would help pay for the remaining two years of the plan.

Over all, Mr. Pataki's budget seeks to close a projected $4.15 billion gap in the state budget, in part by making deep cuts in health care for the state's low-income and poor people, taxing hospitals and nursing homes and giving New York City only a fraction of the education aid a court-appointed panel said it deserved by next year.

Transit and civic groups sharply criticized the budget, saying it would cripple long-awaited transit projects while leaving the financing uncertain for maintenance and upgrades that the Metropolitan Transportation Authority has described as essential.

New York City residents may be most interested in the governor's proposal to spend $2 billion for the Second Avenue subway and the railroad connection to Grand Central. The authority had asked for $3.7 billion to complete the railroad project and finish the first segment of the subway, from 125th to 63rd Streets, by about 2011. Supporters of the projects said the financing decision could mean that both are delayed until 2020 or later.

"This is not going to be done in my professional life and maybe not in my lifetime, which is very disappointing because the state's own economic forecasts can't be fulfilled," said Robert D. Yaro, president of the Regional Plan Association, one of the city's oldest civic organizations.

John F. Cape, the acting director of the state's Division of the Budget, acknowledged that the authority "will continue to face challenges in the coming months and years," but he added, "We are committed to working with them to ensure that they will meet the current and future needs of New York's commuters."

Other aides vigorously disputed the advocates' assertion that the subway and railroad projects would have to be delayed.

For the city and state university systems, the budget proposes to cut $137 million from operating costs at the senior colleges and gives the trustees the authority to offset those cuts by raising tuition.

The governor would allow increasing tuition at the State University of New York by $500 and at the City University of New York by $250, and some Republicans and Democrats in the Legislature said the schools would have to use the entire increase because of the governor's changes.

In his budget address, delivered to lawmakers and officials in a theater at the Empire State Plaza, the governor said that the state was still facing serious economic trouble and that painful choices were needed to "take the responsible, prudent path to fiscal stability." Under state law, the budget deadline is April 1, which Albany has failed to meet for 20 years in a row.

He proposed about $700 million in tax increases, including a higher excise tax on wine, and he called for an extension of a tax on clothing and footwear priced under $110, a tax that was supposed to end on May 31. He also proposed to lower more quickly than planned surcharges on two categories of income: between $150,000 and $500,000 and those earning above $500,000. The change would cost the state $190 million in revenue.

Mr. Pataki said his tax cuts would encourage economic growth, but this proposal raised objections from one of the governor's chief antagonists, Sheldon Silver, the speaker of the State Assembly. "This is all about the wealthy," said Mr. Silver, a Democrat. He added that the capital plan for the transportation authority was "totally undefined," though it counts on increases in vehicle registration fees and the mortgage recording tax, which is paid by homeowners when they buy a home or refinance their mortgage.

The governor said his budget, the 11th of his tenure, increases state spending by 2.4 percent, which he said was less than the 2.7 percent rate of inflation. But that figure assumes that the state will spend $103 billion in the fiscal year ending March 31, although lawmakers had previously put the amount of this year's spending at about $101 billion. Aides to the governor said the spending increase was primarily caused by an accounting change that added the full $4.4 billion cost of the Health Care Reform Act to the state's regular operating budget. That program, which used money from tobacco industry settlements and other revenue to pay for several expensive but politically popular items, like hospital subsidies and health insurance for low-income workers, is set to expire on June 30.

Edmund J. McMahon, a policy analyst with the Manhattan Institute, a conservative policy group, said that spending was still too high in New York, with projected gaps of $2.7 billion in fiscal years 2007 and 2008. The governor proposes to increase spending of state funds - exclusive of federal aid - by 5.4 percent, Mr. McMahon said.

In seeking to close the budget gap, the governor focused on health care and Medicaid, the health insurance program for the poor, to trim nearly $1 billion in spending, including the reimbursement rates for the state's hospitals and nursing homes. That lower state spending would cause local cuts and lead to about $3 billion in reduced spending on health care across New York, said Jennifer Cunningham, the political director of 1199/S.E.I.U, the health care workers' union. That is because the state's contribution generates matching money from the federal government and localities.

The governor was under increased pressure this year to comply with an order from the State Court of Appeals to increase school spending significantly to provide New York City's 1.1 million public students with a sound basic education. A court-appointed panel said that would mean about $1.4 billion in new funds for the city next year alone. In his budget, the governor proposed expanding video gambling to increase money aimed at educating the neediest children around the state. That fund would provide $325 million in the first year, which is the precise amount Mr. Pataki proposed last year.

Beyond that, he proposed providing $4.7 billion in state, local and federal funds for New York City schools over five years, a plan that mirrors one that he submitted to a panel of court-appointed referees last fall, and which the panel rejected. That plan relies on tapping gambling revenues for $1.2 billion, relying on the federal government for $1 billion, and counting on the city to contribute $1.5 billion more, though the Bloomberg administration has vociferously resisted contributing any additional money.

Michael Rebell, the executive director of the Campaign for Fiscal Equity, the group that brought the lawsuit that led to the court order, said of the governor's plan: "It's an incredible rehash. It's a disappointment. This warmed-over budget plan has already been rejected by the Legislature."

Still, aides to the governor said his budget would increase state education aid to $15.9 billion next year, an increase of $526 million for the entire state and a number they contended was the largest increase any governor has ever proposed.

"My goal is to solve the question of how we fund those 207 high-needs districts without raising taxes on New Yorkers, and I've offered this as a solution, and I'm willing to listen to other nontax solutions, but I haven't seen them," the governor said.

Mr. Pataki also called for allowing New York City to open an unlimited number of charter schools by exempting the city from a statewide limit of 100 such schools that was established in 1998. That limit threatened to be an obstacle for Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg in his effort to open 50 new charter schools and the city cheered the governor's comments yesterday.

"We applaud the governor," said Michele McManus Higgins, a spokeswoman for Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein. "Charter schools provide our children with additional educational opportunities, and we are pleased that we will be able to build upon our efforts and expand these much-needed opportunities for students in our city."

kliq6

January 19th, 2005, 05:14 PM

Speaking as a UESider who takes the 6 train, ive got to admit that the 7 line extension is much more important then this 2nd ave subway. The 7 line will bring transit to a area that needs to be developed for the health of NYC to continue. This and the East Side Access should take precedent over the Downtown JFK, 2nd Ave and West street Tunnel projects.

pianoman11686

January 19th, 2005, 05:27 PM

Speaking as a former high school student who used to take the 4/5/6 to and from school everyday from Grand Central, I think the 2nd Avenue Subway is really necessary. Though they've done a good job at renovating some of the stations, it's still way too crowded. Plus a new subway line could boost development near the East River in that area, where there hasn't been anything new built in a while.

Clarknt67

January 19th, 2005, 05:59 PM

Speaking as a Brooklynite who uses the 4/5 to get to East side midtown on occaision I can say there are mornings I have to let 2 or 3 trains pass before I can get one that is empty enough to board. The east side lines seem MUCH MUCH more crowded than the west side lines (which I never have that problem with).

Deimos

January 22nd, 2005, 01:49 PM

The 6 is a nightmare during rush hour, I'm on it 4-6 times daily shuttling from my apartment to my office and out to my sales territory. I'm not sure if the 2nd avenue subway will really help out too much in the near term however, it really will just spurn development onto 1st and especially 2nd avenue. The project that's being developed for the L train should be rapidly expanded instead to increase the capacity of the lexington avenue line... granted the entire IRT network (except for the 7 train) would have to be upgraded at the same time, so i'm not sure about how cost effective that will be. Is it possible to upgrade the current cars with the computers that will control the new L trains?

billyblancoNYC

January 22nd, 2005, 07:42 PM

My real question is, why can't they build another el or a light rail? Sure, it's not as "clean looking" as a subway, but it would cost BILLIONS less and take YEARS less to build. If they do this, then they can extend the 7 and do all the other fun stuff they have planned. Both the 7 and the 2nd ave really do need to happen.

Deimos

January 22nd, 2005, 09:51 PM

El's are a waste of money when looking to build a high density area (second avenue and far west side)... people don't want to spend megabucks to live or work where you can hear the train passing by every 5 minutes.

NYatKNIGHT

January 22nd, 2005, 10:15 PM

If they could commit to a good chunk of it, at least. After all, some of it is built already.

Clarknt67

January 24th, 2005, 03:40 PM

My real question is, why can't they build another el or a light rail?

Are you proposing the El be elevated over Second avenue? I just don't see it being a possibility in this day and age. Way to many people would have a cow if it was proposed a noisy train run by their apartment or office every 20 minutes. It's unsightly too. And I don't blame them. If it were me, I'd be the first to organize the protest rally.

A subway is massively expenisve yes, but look how long the last one has lasted. It's worth the added cost.

TLOZ Link5

January 24th, 2005, 03:47 PM

Perhaps if it were light rail, which is much more quiet.

NYCResident

January 24th, 2005, 09:41 PM

I'm all for new projects such as this or extending the 7 line, but with limited funds and faced with the choice maintaining existing infrastructure and new projects, I think you need to put maintenance first. Just as an example, look at the Chambers Street fire.

This one incident has caused extensive damage and will take YEARS before service is fully restored. Priority has to be given to upkeep and maintenance of whats already out there. To be blunt, I feel for those on the far east side ( i use to live there for a number of years), but if they've lived this long without a 2nd ave subway, they can continue to do so until the financial situation is such that makes it feasible..

NewYorkYankee

January 24th, 2005, 10:19 PM

God, this is awful. It will take damn forever to fix. If its fixed, I say this becuase of the $ woes. :?

Kris

February 8th, 2005, 10:05 PM

February 9, 2005

U.S. Backs Second Ave. Subway and Midtown Rail Plan

By SEWELL CHAN

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/dropcap/f.gifederal officials gave two long-planned transit projects - the Second Avenue subway and a Long Island Rail Road extension to Grand Central Terminal - an important endorsement yesterday, adding to pressure on Albany to come up with nearly $10 billion in state matching funds.

Out of 27 projects throughout the country assessed in an annual evaluation by the Federal Transit Administration, the two New York City projects were the only ones to be "highly recommended." Congress uses the recommendations to decide where to spend transit money. That endorsement may do little, however, to alter the situation in Albany, where Gov. George E. Pataki proposed a budget last month that would give the Metropolitan Transportation Authority $19.2 billion for its next five-year capital program, far less than the $27.7 billion requested.

The budget would include $2 billion over five years for expansion projects like the subway line and the rail extension, about a quarter of what the authority says it needs to open the first segment of the subway by 2011 and the Midtown rail extension by 2012.

While the issue of state aid is unresolved, the endorsement yesterday was a step toward the authority's goal of obtaining a multiyear agreement that would lock in federal aid for the projects.

The administrator of the Federal Transit Administration, an arm of the Department of Transportation, said she envisioned ultimately spending $2.6 billion, or 34 percent, of the $7.7 billion cost of the 3.5-mile rail extension, and $1.3 billion, or 30 percent, of the $4.3 billion needed for the initial 2.3-mile segment of the Second Avenue subway. She suggested that support from New York State would be critical to keep the projects moving.

"We are awaiting, primarily, the state-local funding commitment, and it is our understanding that deliberations continue now with the Legislature and with the M.T.A. about that commitment," the administrator, Jennifer L. Dorn, said in a conference call with reporters. "We believe strongly that if the federal government is going to make a contractual commitment, subject to appropriations, for the completion of the entire project, that the state-locality should do the same."

Ms. Dorn said of the two projects, "one is substantially ahead, in terms of time frame, than the other."

The Long Island Rail Road extension has so far received $254.5 million in federal money. The transit administration recommended that another $390 million be provided in fiscal 2006, and it expects to issue a financing agreement for the project in the next few months, which would essentially guarantee federal support for the duration of construction, assuming that the state provides its share.

The Second Avenue subway has received $8.9 million in federal aid, according to the transit administration, which said it expected to approve the project's final design early this year.

According to Federal Transit Administration documents, the subway line would serve 202,000 riders and the rail extension would serve 167,300 riders each weekday by 2025. "Each of these projects has significant federal support and incredible transportation benefits to a significant population," Ms. Dorn said.

Also yesterday, the Empire State Transportation Alliance, a coalition of civic, environmental and transportation groups, announced a $500,000 advertising campaign to promote financing of five-year capital programs for mass transit and state highways.

Janette Sadik-Khan, who was a transportation adviser to Mayor David N. Dinkins and a deputy administrator of the Federal Transit Administration under President Bill Clinton, said fast-growing areas in the West and South were likely to lobby Congress for the same federal transit dollars that New York needs.

"It's crucial that the state come up with the local match for these projects or we will find the money diverted to other parts of the country: Denver, Dallas, Portland, Phoenix," she said.

But Lynn Rasic, a spokeswoman for Mr. Pataki, said the risk of losing federal money had been overstated. "There is absolutely no indication that any actions to date would jeopardize future funds," she said.

Copyright 2005 (http://www.nytimes.com/ref/membercenter/help/copyright.html) The New York Times Company (http://www.nytco.com/)

mkeit

February 28th, 2005, 10:00 AM

I wonder if the MTA and DEP talk to each other. Shafts fot Water Tunnel 3 will be dug at Madison St and St James Pl, 2nd Ave and 54 St and 2nd Ave and either 35 or 38 Sts.

These are along the route and at station locations.

tmg

March 1st, 2005, 11:26 AM

The water tunnel is much deeper than the subway tunnel will be, and the water tunnel will be finished long before subway construction begins in those areas. Planning for the subway does take the water tunnel into account.

mkeit

March 1st, 2005, 01:57 PM

I understand the depth. At the water tunnel shaft locations, large distributing water mains 4-6' in diameter are installed. This has to interfer with the open cut station work and add extra cost.

I remember a few years ago when very large diameter mains were installed along 34th Ave and 35th Ave in Jackson Heights. A several-block long section was dug up recently by the contractor on the BQE reconstruction in order to lower the streets.

Different agencies should compare notes.

TonyO

June 8th, 2005, 11:46 AM

NY Newsday

MTA mulling options for expansion, including big debt increase

BY JOSHUA ROBIN
STAFF WRITER

In an attempt to revive the Second Avenue subway and East Side Access, MTA officials are considering a controversial proposal that would put the agency deeper in debt, several sources said this week.

The move, still under consideration by elected state officials, would float at least $3 billion in new bonds.

It is one of several options the Metropolitan Transportation Authority is mulling as it tries to move ahead with expansion projects after it received about $5.5 billion less in state aid than it requested.

The new bonds would allow the agency to move faster with the two projects by borrowing against future subsidies that come from federal coffers.

But with this proposal, the agency will saddle itself with more financial obligations -- about $350 million annually for 18 years, sources said -- at a time when MTA officials have indicated that the authority should not take on more debt.

Increasing debt burden was largely to blame for the fare hikes in February and are anticipated to strain future budgets.

An MTA spokesman declined to comment.

The authority has not previously used the bonds, called Grant Anticipation Revenue Vehicles, or GARVEE bonds, said Scott Trommer, senior director at Fitch Ratings, which assess MTA bonds.

Transit activist Gene Russianoff, staff attorney for the Straphangers Campaign, was skeptical of the plan.

"They told us they could do no more than $4 billion [in bonds] in the 2005-2009 plan and now they are looking at $3 billion more in bonding," he said. "Given the MTA's huge past borrowing and dire finances, it may mean larger fare hikes and deeper service cuts."

Jeremy Soffin, a spokesman for the Regional Plan Association, an influential policy group, said that while more needs to be learned about the plan, "now's the time to take extreme measures, if that's what's necessary, to save these critical expansion projects."

The Continuation and The Completion of The 2nd Avenue Line When Completed will Relieve The Overcrowding on The Lexington Avenue 4,5 & 6 Lines Along The East Side of Manhattan.Try Taking The Uptown #6 During The Rush Hour and You'll See What I'm Talking About,I Live Along The #6 Line in The Bx. and I Know,I Had to go into The City One Day to Take Care of Business and I Rode That Train Back Uptown from 51st Street and You Talk About OVERCROWDED!!.It's Really Unbelieveable too!!

NoyokA

June 21st, 2005, 10:28 PM

Since congestion is so bad on the Lexington Avenue line I’m wondering who here would’ve preferred if the Third Avenue El instead of being torn down, would exist today to assist with the congestion?

macreator

June 21st, 2005, 11:58 PM

I still prefer 3rd Avenue without the unsightly El and I'm sure the companies located on 3rd avenue share my feelings.

What we need is a 2nd avenue subway to alleviate overcrowding and NYC needs to start this project soon if we are to compete with emerging Asian cities such as Hong Kong where billions is being spent on creating a 21st century infrastructure.

mkeit

June 22nd, 2005, 09:28 AM

Elevateds destroy the quality of life for people living adjacent to them. If the Third Ave El had not been torn down, Third Ave would not have developed the way it has.

In addition, the Second and Third Ave els were lightweight structures that would have had to be totally reconstructed. The were not designed to last 100 years.

To me, the SAS should have a much higher priority than the East Side Access.

BPC

June 22nd, 2005, 02:23 PM

The Train! The Train!

By GENE RUSSIANOFF
Published: June 18, 2005

The best way to revive Lower Manhattan - and give a boost to Midtown - is to build a subway line that carries people from Harlem and the East Side to work downtown. This would be a wonderfully appropriate way to spend 9/11 funds.

A Second Avenue subway line would better the lives of about 600,000 riders by giving them another transportation option and relieving crowded conditions on the Lexington Avenue line. Right now, the Lexington Avenue's three lines, the No.'s 4, 5 and 6, carry 40 percent of the 23-line system's riders. The crowded trains are an ordeal for rush-hour riders and a disincentive for businesses to move downtown.

The project would also make good economic sense. According to the Regional Plan Association, the new line would offer time and trip savings of $1.26 billion a year - that's in addition to the 70,000 construction jobs it would generate.

Sadly, the project is in some financial peril. The "minimum operating segment," as the federal government calls the first phase of the Second Avenue subway line, would attract hundreds of thousands of people. (This is the stretch that would go from Harlem to Midtown and then on to Brooklyn through an existing line.) But the $3.6 billion first phase needs about $2.5 billion to be completed in the next seven years, and unfortunately Albany didn't allocate enough money for the first phase in the most recent state budget.

As a result, a dangerous idea is now afloat: additional borrowing. This would saddle the subway's seven million daily riders with higher fares and deeper cuts, resulting in more maintenance problems.

Thankfully, there's a smart way out. Instead of borrowing, let's use 9/11 federal funds for the Second Avenue line. And there's precedent. New centers for the PATH trains and the South Ferry terminal are already using terrorist recovery funds and work will begin soon on a federally financed transit center at the Fulton Street and Broadway-Nassau stations.

But for the Second Avenue subway to happen, Mayor Bloomberg and Gov. George E. Pataki need to become stronger champions for the project.

Here's what the mayor should do. The City of New York gives only $75 million a year to the Metropolitan Transportation Authority's general repair program. For 20 years, the city gave $100 million to $200 million annually. The city is flusher today and more money could go to stations like two downtown Chambers Street stations, dropped from the authority's repair program. Other decrepit stations, including those in Bensonhurst and Forest Hills, could also benefit.

The governor's first step should be to direct $80 million of 9/11 funds to the Cortlandt Street station. Although it was the only subway station destroyed in the collapse of the twin towers, its restoration would be inexplicably borne by the riding public, through the system's general repair program.

Some argue that it would be hard to make the case in Washington for a Second Avenue subway getting Sept. 11 funds. But conventional wisdom is often wrong.

New York shows over and over again that victory can be snatched from defeat. Supporters of the Westway project, which would have created a highway through landfill under the environmentally sensitive waters of the Hudson River, lament its 1985 failure. But they neglect to mention the $1.4 billion its trade-in raised for new subway cars at a critical time. And for years, downtown was told that there was going to be a four-block, $860 million West Street tunnel next to ground zero, but after years of local protest and business objections, this boondoggle has been abandoned and some $500 million to $600 million of federal 9/11 funds are now up for grabs.

What more fitting recipient for 9/11 funds is there than a subway to downtown that helps New Yorkers get back to work?

Gene Russianoff is a lawyer for the New York Public Interest Research Group's Straphangers Campaign.

Alonzo-ny

August 1st, 2005, 06:26 PM

This may seem like a dumb question but isnt there more needful things than a subway for 2nd ave? like the jfk rail link? Who is the 2nd ave train going to benifit most?

pianoman11686

August 1st, 2005, 06:34 PM

I'm assuming you've never ridden the Lexington Avenue line during rush hours. It is by far the most used subway in the city, and it's the only line that serves the entire East Side! It should be MTA's first priority on the long line of big transit projects, or at the very least, second.

Alonzo-ny

August 1st, 2005, 06:40 PM

I guess your right but it would need a good connection by going through grand central or be connected to the 7 on 42nd and 2nd maybe and is it planned to go into brooklyn and the bronx or what? Where will the stations be set downtown?

ASchwarz

August 1st, 2005, 06:41 PM

This may seem like a dumb question but isnt there more needful things than a subway for 2nd ave? like the jfk rail link? Who is the 2nd ave train going to benifit most?

Projected ridership for the SAS is over 500,000 passengers; significantly more than the entire heavy rail ridership of the City of Chicago. The SAS is almost certainly the most important transit project in the US.

pianoman11686

August 1st, 2005, 06:44 PM

From the MTA website (http://www.mta.info/capconstr/sas/sas_stations.htm):

"The Second Avenue Subway Broadway Line service will run from 125th Street to 63rd Street along Second Avenue and then continue south to Brooklyn via the existing Broadway Line, with a stop at 63rd Street and Lexington Avenue. The Second Avenue Subway trunk line will run along Second Avenue from 125th Street to Lower Manhattan.

Stations on the Second Avenue Subway trunk line would generally be spaced approximately 1/2 mile apart. Stations on the Second Avenue route are being proposed in the vicinity of the following locations:

Transfers to adjacent subway lines, including the Lexington Avenue Line at 125th Street, 53rd Street Line at 57th Street, Flushing Line at 42nd Street, Canarsie Line at 14th Street, the Sixth Avenue Line at Houston Street and Manhattan Bridge Line at Grand Street, will be evaluated."

Alonzo-ny

August 1st, 2005, 07:19 PM

I dont see the point in at least going down to 42nd for visiting the UN or whatever and i dont think the broadway line needs any more trains and times square is already well serviced as is west 34th street. Just as a matter of interest what was the last new line or extension constructed

Citytect

August 1st, 2005, 07:52 PM

Are you suggesting they should skip 34th and 42nd streets? That would be the dumbest plan ever. Those are two of the cities busiest thoroughfare. Also, if you look at the map on the MTA website, you will see that the Broadway Q line is going to be extending into the UES. No additional subway service will be added along Broadway.

Side note: I wish they'd add a station on 2nd Ave between 14th St. and Houston. There's a large area unserviced by subway around there. Maybe it's impossible for reasons I don't know about, though.

Alonzo-ny

August 1st, 2005, 07:58 PM

No im saying we dont really require another train passing through times square or at 34th and 6th as there are already many trains accessing there, im suggesting stations on 42nd and on 34th further east. Personally id like a train going up 5th avenue from at least 34th street to access everything on 5th and to make it easier to access the park and the museums up there as i hate the walk from lex ave from the 6 train

ASchwarz

August 1st, 2005, 08:07 PM

No im saying we dont really require another train passing through times square or at 34th and 6th as there are already many trains accessing there, im suggesting stations on 42nd and on 34th further east. Personally id like a train going up 5th avenue from at least 34th street to access everything on 5th and to make it easier to access the park and the museums up there as i hate the walk from lex ave from the 6 train

Alonzo, the SAS will travel under Second Avenue, hence the name. Second Avenue is east of the other subway lines.

Citytect

August 1st, 2005, 08:44 PM

No im saying we dont really require another train passing through times square or at 34th and 6th as there are already many trains accessing there
There will not be another train passing through there. The existing Q train will simply continue further uptown instead of terminating at 57th Street. Please look at the PDF map (http://www.mta.info/capconstr/sas/pdf/overview8_18_03.pdf) on the MTA site. It will make all this very clear.

ablarc

August 1st, 2005, 09:16 PM

Stops are too damn far apart. East Village is left with the same lousy, distant two stations it now has; and there need to be three additional intermediate stops in the gaps between 86th, 72nd, 55th and 42nd.

lofter1

August 1st, 2005, 09:54 PM

i hate the walk from lex ave from the 6 train

Take the C to 81st and walk across the park -- it's just as fast and much nicer.

lofter1

August 1st, 2005, 09:56 PM

I wish they'd add a station on 2nd Ave between 14th St. and Houston. There's a large area unserviced by subway around there. Maybe it's impossible for reasons I don't know about, though.
This planning to omit a station at 2nd Ave / 8th St - Astor Pl. seems very odd.

Anyone know if there is a technical reason why it can't happen?

TonyO

August 2nd, 2005, 08:33 AM

This planning to omit a station at 2nd Ave / 8th St - Astor Pl. seems very odd.

Anyone know if there is a technical reason why it can't happen?

This is a glaring omission on this line, but I doubt any of the planners lives in the east village. What they should do is have this line make a stop at Thompkins Sq Park.

BrooklynRider

August 2nd, 2005, 09:51 AM

It should be a true SAS, from 125th Street to the LES. It would be especially beneficial as so many major hospitals are on the Far East Side in the 30's with limited Mass Transit access.

Ninjahedge

August 2nd, 2005, 10:13 AM

I can see a residential and commercial taking alot of years in the making... When they will start to do this development a bubble will pop up. I mean there are just too many residential projects happening and not alot of demand for office space.

Maybe the stadium wasn't a good idea there... but at least it was something that would have been built to fill in alot of the yards. More like a filler with a pourpose.

I don't think there are too many residential projects for Manhattan.

So long as the area is nice, people will still want to live closer to work. People are frustrated now that they cannot afford to live in the city or anywhere near it because of the bubble. Even if the bubble sticks to the glass ceiling of viable venue or deflates a little I do not see that being a huge problem with development. They will still make their money PROVIDED they do not do it based entirely on loans and speculated early vestment from interested parties.

I would like to see more residential being built, so long as services, recreation and other things keep pace...

Ninjahedge

August 2nd, 2005, 10:21 AM

The MTA's proposal to build the platform itself and then sell the development rights only make sense if you believe that the MTA is a better, smarter real estate developer than any of the City's actual real estate developers. If that is not the case (and who in their right mind believes it is), then the MTA can make more money selling the development rights as-is then in building the platform itself. As for the issue of its hq, that can be divorced from the platform issue. The MTA can contract to move its hq to the West Side regardless of who builds the platform.

My proposal would be to take the $900M surplus, and the $500M or so that the MTA can get from selling the development rights to the West Side railyards as-is, and use it to get the Second Avenue Subway started NOW.

You mean, before the workers start demanding wage increases?

I can respect people wanting more money for the jobs they do, but it seems that every time the fares go up or there is any surplus, it is only a small time before union lobbiests take as much as they can, bringing the surplus down to nill in no time.....

Ninjahedge

August 2nd, 2005, 10:26 AM

Are you suggesting they should skip 34th and 42nd streets? That would be the dumbest plan ever. Those are two of the cities busiest thoroughfare. Also, if you look at the map on the MTA website, you will see that the Broadway Q line is going to be extending into the UES. No additional subway service will be added along Broadway.

Side note: I wish they'd add a station on 2nd Ave between 14th St. and Houston. There's a large area unserviced by subway around there. Maybe it's impossible for reasons I don't know about, though.

Um, are you saying that people cannot walk a bit?

I know that people always want to have a station right outside their door, or right next to their office, but lets not make the same mistake as the 1+9 (14, 18, 23, 28, 32.... every 4 blocks???)

PS, although I do see the point in trying to put the stops that are going to be built in areas that people will be most likely to GO to.....

billyblancoNYC

August 2nd, 2005, 10:54 AM

Um, are you saying that people cannot walk a bit?

I know that people always want to have a station right outside their door, or right next to their office, but lets not make the same mistake as the 1+9 (14, 18, 23, 28, 32.... every 4 blocks???)

PS, although I do see the point in trying to put the stops that are going to be built in areas that people will be most likely to GO to.....

True, but 86th to 72nd, 72nd to 55th, 55th to 42nd seem a bit too spread...this is prime midtown. Not to mention the need to service the EV more. This SAS is to 1) make the commute easier and make more sense for hundreds of thousands of people and 2) to make the whole east side more hospitable to development.

Seems, once again, the MTA and gov't are being penny-wise and pound-foolish. Cut the fat, not the corners.

Ninjahedge

August 2nd, 2005, 01:24 PM

55 to 72 seems a bit long there (17 blocks!) but the others are coming in to the inconvenient, but still dooable range.

I think 10 blocks is fairly reasonable (since it takes about a minute a block to walk it at NYC speeds). A max of 5 mins to walk to a station is no problem.

The only other thing that gets rather difficult would be crossover points. It would be nice if they found a way to loop the 2nd avenue trains onto some west side train (or something similar).

Getting the 2 miles from west village to east is a PITA. When walking is faster than just about anything (including cabs) there has to be a better solution....

czsz

August 2nd, 2005, 04:10 PM

Take the L train. Or a bus on 14th or Houston.

Though I agree there should be a stop between 14th and Houston on the new T. And overall, a circle line like London's (maybe running next to the T and 1 along the east and west sides and connecting via 125th uptown and Canal or Houston downtown) would be a good idea.

Alonzo-ny

August 2nd, 2005, 06:01 PM

Alonzo, the SAS will travel under Second Avenue, hence the name. Second Avenue is east of the other subway lines.

Sorry i just misinterpreted a statement saying it would join the broadway line thinking the train would go down that line at that point, me stupid.

debris

August 2nd, 2005, 08:36 PM

I agree about the buses...the main priority should always be to get more people in and out of midtown quickly. Crosstown buses would be great if priority bus lanes could be created on a major crosstown street, say, West 4th. Just look at how well the crosstown buses work from the UWS to UES (sometimes). The lack of traffic in Central Park makes all the difference.

Besides, people are dying to live in the East Village, subway or no subway. The lack of a stop will keep rents a shade cheaper, that's all. The SAS is all about making midtown and downtown commutes more bearable.

My personal wish is that the MTA should branch out into NJ. Imagine how much more competitive the New York metro region would be if you could commute to midtown from place like Union City and North Bergen in 15 minutes.

czsz

August 2nd, 2005, 09:07 PM

That's what PATH is for. It should be expanding more aggressively.

The uptown crosstown buses are a joke. You sit for ten minutes or so at every avenue. You could almost walk faster, except for the Central Park crossing, which is the only part that's worthwhile.

TLOZ Link5

August 2nd, 2005, 09:51 PM

I know that people always want to have a station right outside their door, or right next to their office, but lets not make the same mistake as the 1+9 (14, 18, 23, 28, 32.... every 4 blocks???)

The Seventh Avenue IRT was designed and built at a time when trains were half the lengths they are now. The Lexington Avenue IRT, whose downtown section was built before Seventh Avenue's, also has this arrangement — though the 18th Street station on that line has since been closed.

STT757

August 2nd, 2005, 10:46 PM

This may seem like a dumb question but isnt there more needful things than a subway for 2nd ave? like the jfk rail link? Who is the 2nd ave train going to benifit most?

The JFK Airtrain-Lower Manhattan rail link with optimistic forecasts would handle about 10,000 daily trips (mostly out of towners), the Second Avenue Subway would handle 10 times that amount and be used mostly by City residents.

Now which project is more important, obviously the SAS.

Citytect

August 2nd, 2005, 10:55 PM

Um, are you saying that people cannot walk a bit?
Um, no. Where did I say anything like that?

The East Village is seriously underserviced by subway. Astor Place station is on Fourth Avenue. The walk over to or from Avenues C and D and further to the East River Park takes a lot longer than the resonable 5 minute walk you suggested. 20 minutes would be fast on many days. The remedy - extensive bus service in Alphabet City - is very inconvenient, rarely on schedule, and pretty much stops completely in snow. Walking is faster MOST of time. There's a huge need for a subway station further east than Astor Place in the East Village.

I know the 1/9 stops too often, but that's a completely different situation. There really isn't a need for all the stops on that line. Adding one station between 14th Street and Houston (i dunno, say, halfway at 7th Street) will have little effect on train efficiency, but it will GREATLY improve public transit in that area. It's definately worth it.

bkmonkey

August 2nd, 2005, 11:57 PM

The Second Avenue line will be the most modern line in the system, with trains runing at a speed of 70 mph (at leat that was the plan in the 70's) a stop every 4 blocks or so, would slow it down. Remember, the second avenue subway, has no local and express, ( somewhat silly to me), thus the TA, has to spread stations out, but not two far apart. It also annoys me that the MTA isnt considering expanding the line into Brooklyn and the Bronx, even Staten Island. Especially, in the case of Brooklyn, residential and commericial developments are expected to put a huge strain on the existing transit lines. It would only be logical for the MTA to consider a line down Flatbush avenue maybe, all the way to kings plaza, or something like that. It is clear that Brooklyn will need another subway line in the near future. Staten Island is relitivley undeveloped, and many New Yorkers treat it like it is New Jersey. Staten Island has alot of potential, if it had a connection with manhattan via subway, that market would expload.

Ninjahedge

August 3rd, 2005, 09:53 AM

Um, no. Where did I say anything like that?

The East Village is seriously underserviced by subway. Astor Place station is on Fourth Avenue. The walk over to or from Avenues C and D and further to the East River Park takes a lot longer than the resonable 5 minute walk you suggested.

I was talking about the walk BETWEEN stops. How far east and west a line is from other regions would only be marginally serviced by putting a stop halfway between them along the same line.

20 minutes would be fast on many days. The remedy - extensive bus service in Alphabet City - is very inconvenient, rarely on schedule, and pretty much stops completely in snow. Walking is faster MOST of time. There's a huge need for a subway station further east than Astor Place in the East Village.

No real need, but a definite want. I am in Upper Hoboken. About a 15-20 min walk on a good day to the PATH train. My GF was living in Forest Hills, a good 15 min walk to the F train. It is amazing how people in the city do not realize how small of a walk they really have sometimes... ;)

I know the 1/9 stops too often, but that's a completely different situation.

Not really. If the 2nd avenue subway were to put in just as many stops, it would no longer be as viable a method of commuting from the upper east to the buisness district.

There really isn't a need for all the stops on that line. Adding one station between 14th Street and Houston (i dunno, say, halfway at 7th Street) will have little effect on train efficiency, but it will GREATLY improve public transit in that area. It's definately worth it.

How do you get that? You say add one station, then the guy up by 50th street says "hey, what about 45th?" and so on and so on.

You think if they put in extra stops that it will only be one? You think that one stop does nothing to commuting time? It adds about 2 min to overall unless the conductor is sadistic and likes to slam people in doors... ;)

The main problem I was addressing is that everyone seems to want one 2 min away from where they are. I do not think this is feasable. This was most likely not intended as a local line.

OTOH, I do agree that the choice of station locations are probably far from optimal. But that is probably also do to the availability of sites to construct these stations under and to put their entrances through.....

TonyO

August 3rd, 2005, 10:26 AM

How do you get that? You say add one station, then the guy up by 50th street says "hey, what about 45th?" and so on and so on.

The difference being, of course, that at 45th street, the amount of potential riders to the east is far less than the the amount to the east of 7th in the east village.

tmg

August 3rd, 2005, 11:01 AM

The only project really on the table at this point is the segment between 63rd Street and 96th Street. Just that one stretch will already cost far more than the MTA has available. If nobody is able to build support around a financing plan for that initial segment, none of the rest of this is ever going to happen.

Ninjahedge

August 3rd, 2005, 11:23 AM

The difference being, of course, that at 45th street, the amount of potential riders to the east is far less than the the amount to the east of 7th in the east village.

You are not sticking to the point.

If you were to make it 3 short blocks closer (hell even 5) you are not going to be putting it more than 5 min closer no matter where you put it if it is along the same line.

What I am saying is that people will always be crying for more, unless they are the ones coming from the upper east side that do not want to stop every 5 blocks REGARDLESS of how many people get on at one of the added stations.

You need to balance it.

Citytect

August 3rd, 2005, 03:11 PM

Ninjahedge, that whole "if one area gets an added station many other areas will want one too" argument is rather played-out. That's not how these decisions should be made. It's an issue of where stations would best serve the public as a whole along the east side of Manhattan. If we're going to build this thing, we should do it right. And we're talking about the planned SAS, so while it is true other areas in the outer borroughs need better service too, this subway line can't really help them as it's in Manhattan. So that's a completely different discussion. If you want to dream up a huge extension into Brooklyn or Queens. We can talk about that somewhere else. Let's stick with discussing what we already have planned here.
There are a LOT of low income families living in "the projects" all the way over between Avenue D and FDR. That's quite a walk from any subway line. There are a lot of, erm, increasingly higher income families living between Avenues A, B, C and D. That's still quite a walk. We're not talking about Hoboken for god's sake. Density is much higher in Manhattan and the number of car drivers is much higher in Hoboken. There is a big difference. And the East Village is a popular destination and would be moreso if it were more accessible. Yes, the area is booming without subway service (so is much of the area the SAS will serve on the UES). Providing subway there will boost the ecomony. Heck, I'll certainly be priced out of the EV if a subway station is added. But that's not an a reason NOT to build.
And my assertion that an added station between 14th Street and Houston would have little effect on train efficiency, isn't untrue. I didn't say it wouldn't add time to a commute. I said it would have little effect. You say 2 minutes. I say that's little effect. The 6 line does it (Broadway-LaFayette, Astor, Union Sq.). I don't see anyone complaining about that. Your complaint is about the too frequent stops on the 1/9. Which is a valid complaint. But that wouldn't be the result of an added station in the area I and several others on this board have suggested.
But in the end, I know it won't happen. The money's not there. Proposing adding any expense to this project is ultimately laughable. I just wanted to point out the unfortunate exclusion.

BPC

August 3rd, 2005, 03:36 PM

Perhaps we should change the name of this thread to "Second Avenue Subway OFF Track" ?

Ninjahedge

August 3rd, 2005, 03:46 PM

Ninjahedge, that whole "if one area gets an added station many other areas will want one too" argument is rather played-out. That's not how these decisions should be made. It's an issue of where stations would best serve the public as a whole along the east side of Manhattan. If we're going to build this thing, we should do it right. And we're talking about the planned SAS, so while it is true other areas in the outer borroughs need better service too, this subway line can't really help them as it's in Manhattan. So that's a completely different discussion. If you want to dream up a huge extension into Brooklyn or Queens. We can talk about that somewhere else. Let's stick with discussing what we already have planned here.

Um, I never said anything about that. You are taking other peoples arguements and putting them in with mine. I am only saying that if you start saying "12 blocks between stations is too much" and ask for that one all important station that you would find most convenient at 14th street, then there will be more petitioning for other stations from other people.

I am not saying that it should not be looked into to try to get the spots that people use the most, but using the example of the 1 and 9, if you can get dropped off at 18th street, why does everyone have to stop at 23rd? So you and the small portion of riders getting off at that station walk 5 minutes less?

The PATH train had 2 stations like that I believe that they shut down for various reasons. I can't see why similar steps cant be taken with the 1+9 or avoided entirely by the SAS proposal.

I am not trying to down every suggestion, just offering some reality to the mix.

here are a LOT of low income families living in "the projects" all the way over between Avenue D and FDR. That's quite a walk from any subway line.

And this matters why? Why would this matter in making a subway stop 5 blocks from another?

There are a lot of, erm, increasingly higher income families living between Avenues A, B, C and D. That's still quite a walk. We're not talking about Hoboken for god's sake.

Why not? The "higher income" people are also living in Hoboken you know. The walk is just as long from uptown. There are ferries and bus services provided from various developments, but even those take a good 10-15 to get downtown.

Anyway, it is quite a walk, but cutting 5 short blocks from th ewalk only cuts 5 minutes from the walk. 1/4 a mile.

Density is much higher in Manhattan and the number of car drivers is much higher in Hoboken.

What are you going on about. This has nothing to do with why there should not be a stop every 5 blocks. If you have ever tried to park in Hoboken you would realize that most people walk because it takes less time than waiting for a spot to open up.

There is a big difference. And the East Village is a popular destination and would be moreso if it were more accessible. Yes, the area is booming without subway service (so is much of the area the SAS will serve on the UES). Providing subway there will boost the ecomony. Heck, I'll certainly be priced out of the EV if a subway station is added. But that's not an a reason NOT to build.

I am not ruling out the entire SAS. I think you are reading me wrong. I am just against the over-stationizing of the line. I am for the 2nd avenue subway, I am just cautioing against putting too many stations too close together. The only difficult thing I see about putting them where they are needed the most (most convenient but not conjesting) is that those areas may not have any property that is available for development.

And my assertion that an added station between 14th Street and Houston would have little effect on train efficiency, isn't untrue.

I am not saying it is false, but it will add 2 minutes. 2 minutes to a 40 min commute is very small, but that is only one station. ANY addition of stations makes the train less efficient, no matter how you look at it...

I didn't say it wouldn't add time to a commute. I said it would have little effect. You say 2 minutes. I say that's little effect.

Again, that is one station. Now add 5. Add one between each of the stations listed. Make it so that areas have 2 stations added so that there is no more than 6 blocks between them. Your 40 minute commute just got 25%-30% longer.

The 6 line does it (Broadway-LaFayette, Astor, Union Sq.). I don't see anyone complaining about that.

You are mixing your arguements. If they removed that station, or 5 stations in between on the 6 line, you think that the people that do not USE those stops would complain?

The thing is, once people use it, they will complain when it is removed, so the analogy is a hard one to counter. But I will bet you money that if you asked people if they would like to cut 10 min off their commute w/o any real change to their routine that few, if any, would turn you down.

Your complaint is about the too frequent stops on the 1/9. Which is a valid complaint. But that wouldn't be the result of an added station in the area I and several others on this board have suggested.

You said one station. I said the danger is ADDING too many stations. I also said a re-evaluation of the layout should be taken to determine where the best spots would be. Reducing the 17 block gap on the mid portion of the line to 10 or so blocks would help a lot, but squeezing an extra stop between two that are 10 blocks apart is not. Shifting one of the stops would be a better solution.

Why do you need a 28th street stop on the 1+9 if there is another one at 32nd?

But in the end, I know it won't happen. The money's not there. Proposing adding any expense to this project is ultimately laughable. I just wanted to point out the unfortunate exclusion.

Nah. Petition a re-evaluation. Placing them where more people can reach more conveniently or near end destinations is probably the best solution.

I think the problem goes back to what i said in the beginning. There may be no real way they can, or can afford (as you just said) stops in certain areas. You can only move a certain ammount of old ladies out of their apartments before EVERYONE is on your case... ;)

ablarc

August 3rd, 2005, 03:52 PM

The Second Avenue line will be the most modern line in the system, with trains runing at a speed of 70 mph (at leat that was the plan in the 70's) a stop every 4 blocks or so, would slow it down. Remember, the second avenue subway, has no local and express, (somewhat silly to me), thus the TA, has to spread stations out, but not too far apart.
I get a charge every time an express train I’m on gets to haul ass; 45mph seems such breakneck speed when you’re in a narrow tunnel. But having ridden subways much of my life while living in New York, Paris, London and Boston, I’m mostly impressed by the speed itself, not the time that it saves me. The reason: I’d save a lot more time door to door if I had a shorter walk and a slower train.

When you’re walking to the subway stop, your forward progress towards your goal is 3mph, 4mph if you’re truckin'. When you’re waiting on the platform your forward progress is zero mph. When you’re on the train, it’s whatever the average speed of the train is, including stops (let’s say somewhere between ten and 35mph).

4. Transfer to 4 or 5. Total: 1 minute walk. Distance covered on way to destination: negligible. Running tally of trip so far: 19 minutes (0.32 hours) walking and waiting and riding; 1.05 miles covered towards destination. Calculated average speed = 3.3mph. You can see from the average speed so far that a viable alternative here is to walk directly from Tompkins Square to Union Square, especially if you take advantage of the distance-saving diagonal of Fourth Avenue and if you’re a fairly brisk walker. You could also have chosen to walk to Astor Place (Option B), in which case you’d have invested exactly the same amount of time to get to the express.

6. Hot dog, I’m on the Express!! All the way to 59th Street!!! Total: 6 minutes (2 stops) of delirious subway riding, including the little layover at Grand Central. Now we’re cookin’! Distance covered on way to destination: 2.3 miles @ 23 mph (train lurches to dizzying speed of 40 mph for 10 or 15 seconds in one stretch). Running tally of trip so far: 28 minutes (0.47 hours) walking and waiting and riding; 3.35 miles covered towards destination. Calculated average speed of trip so far = a dazzling 7.2mph!

2. 50.0% of the trip time was spent walking (almost a mile in all), 20.0% was spent waiting for a train, 30.0% was spent actually riding a train. You can easily see which of these three you can take the most time out of.

3. If the express train peaked at 70mph rather than 40mph (mucho dollares suspension, white-knuckle standees), the six-minute express ride would plunge to 4-1/2 minutes (30.67 mph average speed, including GC layover!). The overall door-to-door trip would be reduced by the same amount: 90 seconds. You could get the same outcome by reducing the walk by a block and a half.

* * *

Now let’s do the same commute with the Second Avenue subway rerouted so there’s a stop right at Tompkins Square, as there ought to be, and with two additional stops between 14th Street and 72nd Street:

2. 31.8% of the trip time was spent walking (.37 miles), 13.6% was spent waiting for a train, 54.5% was spent actually riding a train.

* * *

Which commute would you prefer for the daily grind?

Personally I’d rather be on a slow train than walking. I don’t get very far at 3 miles per hour; even the snail’s pace of a Paris Metro train is faster than I can walk. And at the end of the day my feet don’t hurt as much.

.

Citytect

August 3rd, 2005, 04:26 PM

Again, I don't think you're argument that adding one station will lead to the adding of 5 more is correct at all. That's not the way things work. Maybe it does in a second grade classroom, but not in city planning.
The East Village goes farther East that any other part of Manhattan, making it farther to walk. On top of that, there is also a 14 block distance planned between the two closest stations in that area on the SAS. That's more than the average distance between stations on the subway in Manhattan. That puts a lot of the EV too far from subway service, IMO.
Why does adding one station 7 (not 5) blocks away make a difference? Because without one, there is a large area of in the middle area between 14th and Houston in Alphabet City that is farther from a train than any of the areas on the UES. And because there are more Avenues in the East Village than on the UES, the distance is quite a bit further. Walking is a lot slower than a train. Most of your commute time is going to be spent walking to a station. Bringing that rather significant (in size, because it extends further east) middle section of the far east side of the East Village closer to a station would cut their commute time significantly.
Your approach of looking only at the distance between two stations if rather short-sited if you ask me. There are more things to consider.

Ninjahedge

August 3rd, 2005, 06:00 PM

Again, I don't think you're argument that adding one station will lead to the adding of 5 more is correct at all. That's not the way things work. Maybe it does in a second grade classroom, but not in city planning.

Ah insults will make me agree with you even more. Especially when I am agreeing with a lot of what you are saying but a few sticky points that will come up again and again.

The East Village goes farther East that any other part of Manhattan, making it farther to walk. On top of that, there is also a 14 block distance planned between the two closest stations in that area on the SAS.

Again, do you want me to do some trig for you showing you that adding one that is only a few blocks NORTH or SOUTH of a given point will not help your EAST WEST walk much, if at all?

I, for one, zig-zag across blocks when I am walking diagonally cross town. The time it takes me to walk the short blocks is not much in comparison to the 4X length for each long block...

That's more than the average distance between stations on the subway in Manhattan. That puts a lot of the EV too far from subway service, IMO.

??? Average distance between what? Stations? I know you are getting at something, but I think you dropped a word or two...

Why does adding one station 7 (not 5) blocks away make a difference? Because without one, there is a large area of in the middle area between 14th and Houston in Alphabet City that is farther from a train than any of the areas on the UES. And because there are more Avenues in the East Village than on the UES, the distance is quite a bit further. Walking is a lot slower than a train. Most of your commute time is going to be spent walking to a station.

You mean like it is for 3/4 of Queens? Bringing the station 4 blocks closer will make, asy, 5% of the peoples's commute 5 min shorter, and make 20% of it 2 min longer. A net loss of 15%/min (nonsensical units, I know, but still).

Again, what says that everyone will agree with the station between 14th and houston and not up in the larger spans? Just because their walk is shorter across town does not mean that they will want to walk an extra 5 minutes either.

Bringing that rather significant (in size, because it extends further east) middle section of the far east side of the East Village closer to a station would cut their commute time significantly.

No it would not. Not unless the 2nd avenue subway went out to avenue A.

Your approach of looking only at the distance between two stations if rather short-sited if you ask me. There are more things to consider.

Yes, and I am considering them.

I am considering constant velocity of a train versus deceleration, loading and acceleration for time lag.

I am looking at the number of people that woould be serviced for the stop as compared to the number that would be inconvenienced.

I am looking at the fact that people are very "well if THEY have one, I want one too" and that people will be arguing for their own stop to be closer. There is no easily "equitable" solution that can be presented to the people that they will swallow other than the sheer number of blocks between stops.

Question though, what is important on 14th street that it needs to have a stop there anyhow? Would it be better to bring it down to 8th (if it is called 8th) and put in another above between the next two?

What would benefit the most people, AND be the easiest to sell AND inconvenience the least people.

And most importantly. What would COST less?

ablarc

August 3rd, 2005, 06:07 PM

^ Not having a subway of any kind would cost least of all.

TLOZ Link5

August 3rd, 2005, 07:22 PM

^ Not having a subway of any kind would cost least of all.

On the contrary, it would wind up costing us the most, long-term.

ablarc

August 3rd, 2005, 07:25 PM

^ My point exactly.

PW&PF.

Citytect

August 4th, 2005, 12:16 AM

Ninjahedge, first, no insult was intended previously. I see how it might be interpretted that way. I was just trying to illustrate my opinion vividly. Apologies. Do you visit the East Village often? Honestly.

Applying simple equations to the ridership of the subway line is helpful, but the reality is far more complex than can be related through the numbers. My opinion is that the added convenience of having a subway station on 2nd Avenue between 14th and Houston will outweigh the small inconvenience in commute times along that line. You feel that the addition of one subway station will lead to cries for more added stations and that those stations will be granted. And then the SAS will eventually become inefficient. I disagree. While I'm sure others will want a station closer to their homes or office too, there is a line to draw. It seems you draw the before any addition. I would draw it after one - a station placed in an area particularly inconvenient to the subway and an area that is a popular destination.

I think we will agree that ideally the MTA should reconsider all the station locations. I agree that a 14th Street station in questionable on the SAS. I think ideally there should be a station on 2nd (better yet, 1st) Avenue around St. Marks with stations about 10 blocks north and 10 blocks south on 2nd Avenue. Would you find that more acceptable? The problem with that is the stations on 14th and Houston are transfer points to other subway lines, thus making them necessary. Cross-town buses are also on those streets.

There's really not a perfect solution.

Ninjahedge

August 4th, 2005, 08:46 AM

On the contrary, it would wind up costing us the most, long-term.

But politicians and lawmakers are not concerned about long term.

Long term does not get you re-elected. People want to see instant results, which is one of the reasons the switch to Hybrids (an entirely different subject) has taken so long.

People do not care that it might help them, and everyone else down the line 10 years from now, they are only cocerned about $$ now..... :P

BrooklynRider

August 4th, 2005, 09:56 AM

I have to disagree. This mayor and his planning team do seem to be very focused on the long-term. It is getting the MTA to think long term that is really harming the city. The just want bonds and more bonds to do everything and we get hit with huge interest payments and deficits in out-lying years.

BigMac

November 10th, 2005, 12:37 PM

NY Newsday
November 10, 2005

A Second Avenue line in 2012?

BY JOSHUA ROBIN
STAFF WRITER

Subway riders long squeezed on the Nos. 4, 5 and 6 might be wondering when the Second Avenue line will finally be built, now that voters have approved a bond act seen as critical to keeping the project afloat.

The answer is that they will have to keep waiting just a little while longer.

MTA Chairman Peter Kalikow said Wednesday that the agency would in coming days dispatch a delegate to meet with federal transportation officials, who hold the key to building the subway's first section at a cost of $3.8 billion.

When or whether the feds will turn that key remains unanswered for now, although transportation advocates said Wednesday they were confident a new subway -- and a new Long Island Rail Road connection to Grand Central Terminal -- could open around 2012.

The measure passing represents "the point of no return," said transportation advocate Lee Sander, executive director for the Rudin Center for Transportation Policy & Management at New York University.

By their approval, voters allowed the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and the state Department of Transportation to float nearly $3 billion in bonds.

Of that, a total of $1 billion is marked for three MTA projects: the Second Avenue Subway, the LIRR "East Side Access" connection to Grand Central Terminal, and a link from lower Manhattan to Kennedy Airport.

But projects of those size aren't paid for with only one stream of money. The agency the MTA delegates will visit, the Federal Transit Administration, is expected to kick in up to 40 percent of the cost.

First, the FTA needed assurance that New York was committed to paying for its part. With 55 percent of voters statewide approving the bond act, observers say the state did just that.

Even if the FTA approves funding, an additional $3 billion is needed to pay for the subway and the LIRR connection, an amount that Sander said shouldn't be hard to cover. The state would likely have to float more debt, raise fares or collect funds from other agencies, like the Port Authority, for the projects.

"I think this is a great victory for the state," Kalikow told reporters Wednesday.

"This is the public saying to the MTA, 'We trust you with a billion and a half dollars, we think you are going to use that money wisely, spend it correctly,' and these are the things that make my job worthwhile."

More likely it means there are many hoops to jump through and the proposition passing was the first. Also, they probably haven't invested much time in planning for what to do next while waiting for the financing to be approved.

TonyO

November 10th, 2005, 03:32 PM

NY Post
11/10/05

2ND AVE.SUBWAY IS BACK ON TRACK

By BILL SANDERSON

November 10, 2005 -- More than 75 years of talk about the Second Avenue Subway is finally leading to action, thanks to voters' approval of the Transportation Bond Act in Tuesday's election.
Shovels will break ground next year on the new subway line's first phase, which will run down Second Avenue from 96th Street to 63rd Street, MTA Chairman Peter Kalikow said yesterday.

"It is funded," Kalikow said of the project. "It doesn't get any better than this."

Look for him on the line when it opens in 2012 — right around his 70th birthday.

"I'm going to ride through with my half-fare [senior citizen] MetroCard in the first car," Kalikow said. "You'll see me waving if you're in the stations."

The line's first segment is expected to carry 202,000 daily weekday riders.

The $450 million to be raised via the bond act will help the Metropolitan Transportation Authority garner enough federal money to build the subway's $3.8 billion first phase.

Once the paperwork with the feds is finished, Kalikow said, "We sign that — and we rock and roll."

For several years, MTA planners have been working on preliminary engineering and design of the project.

Kalikow said the agency has even begun talks with construction contractors.

The new section of the subway line will allow the MTA to extend the current Q train uptown from its present terminus at 57th Street and Seventh Avenue to new stations on Second Avenue at 72nd Street, 86th Street and 96th Street.

Ultimately, the Second Avenue Subway will run north to 125th Street and south to Hanover Square in the Financial District.

There's no timetable yet for those parts of the project, which the MTA has estimated will cost another $13 billion.

The agency is optimistic that it will find the money to finish the line, and a map currently on its Web site labels the planned East Side local service as the "T" train.

The Federal Transit Administration recommended last year that the line be built in stages to make it easier for the MTA to secure funds and enable riders to benefit as soon as possible.

Discussion of the Second Avenue Subway began in 1929. The Second Avenue el was torn down in 1942, and the Third Avenue el came down in 1956 — but the promised subway line to replace them never materialized, except four bits of tunnel built in the 1970s.

The project was eventually abandoned because of the city's fiscal crisis in the '70s.

The bond act — which allows the MTA and state Department of Transportation to float nearly $3 billion in bonds — also allows construction to continue on the East Side Access project, which will bring Long Island Rail Road trains into Grand Central Terminal. There's already a tunnel under the East River ready for the connection.

The bond act also includes $100 million for the planning and study of a new rail link between Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn to downtown Manhattan.

The plan is to allow faster travel between Kennedy Airport and the Financial District, but transit watchers believe the project could end up taking other forms — such as extending LIRR service downtown.

Other MTA projects that will be funded by the bond act include $60 million for new subway cars in 2008 and $50 million for new express buses in 2009.

bill.sanderson@nypost.com

lofter1

November 10th, 2005, 07:44 PM

Once the paperwork with the feds is finished, Kalikow said, "We sign that — and we rock and roll."

Hate it when pols talk like that :mad: .

Reminds me of another recent famous phrase: "Slam Dunk"

Discussion of the Second Avenue Subway began in 1929 ... the promised subway line to replace them never materialized, except four bits of tunnel built in the 1970s. The project was eventually abandoned because of the city's fiscal crisis in the '70s.

So don't hold your breath ;)

TonyO

November 12th, 2005, 11:08 AM

NY Sun

WEEKEND

By JEREMY SMERD, Special to the Sun

Q: Now that the bond passed and - if the hype is to be believed - the Second Avenue subway will finally be built, what letter or number will be assigned to it?

A: Officially, no designation has been made, but a spokesman for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, Tom Kelly, confirmed widespread and long heard rumors that the likeliest designation is the letter T. He would not, however, confirm the color the line is rumored to be assigned: turquoise. The first $3.8 billion phase of the $16 billion project will run from 96th Street to 63rd Street, where it will veer west and connect with the Q line. At that point, the new line will likely be subsumed by the Q, which will end at 96th Street rather than its current terminus at 57th Street. Eventually, the line will run from 125th Street in Harlem to Hanover Square in Lower Manhattan.

The theory that the letter T was chosen because it was the last remaining letter not already used at one point in the subway is wrong. The letter T was used for a now defunct branch of the M line. Other letters that are not currently in use include H, I, K, O, P, X, and Y. The letters I and O are generally considered unusable because they resemble the numbers 1 and 0. P was considered in the 1990s for a shuttle between John F. Kennedy International Airport and Penn Station. Some say that effort was abandoned because no one wanted to tell strangers to "go to 34th Street and take a P." Or, when the lettered lines had two letters to designate local service, you would have had to take a "P P to Penn Station." Officials at the MTA, however, would not confirm this claim.

They only need to come up with $3.35 BILLION more!! (And a mere $12.5+ BILLION more for the entire thing.)

Maybe your great-great-grandchildren will be the first to ride down the east-side underground.

antinimby

November 12th, 2005, 08:23 PM

...And a mere $12.5+ BILLION more for the entire thing.)

The $13 billion figure is only if construction takes place now. Cost would only increase as time goes on.

lofter1

November 12th, 2005, 08:56 PM

OK, so maybe your great-great-great-great grandchildren...

TonyO

November 16th, 2005, 11:45 AM

NY Times
November 16, 2005

Transit Agency Authorizes Funds for 2nd Avenue Line

By SEWELL CHAN
After months of uncertainty about the pace and progress of the Second Avenue subway, a project that seems to be forever on the drawing board, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority intends today to authorize spending $150.4 million for the final design of a first segment, from East 96th to East 63rd Streets.

To be sure, the amount is but a fraction of the estimated $3.8 billion cost of the 2.2-mile segment, which is not projected to be completed until 2012 at the earliest. The entire 8.5-mile line would extend from 125th Street and Lexington Avenue in Harlem to Hanover Square in Lower Manhattan and cost $16.8 billion.

Still, the decision is the biggest financial affirmation of the authority's support for the project since November 2001, when its board awarded a $200.5 million contract to two engineering companies- Arup, a British company, and the DMJM Harris unit of Aecom - for preliminary engineering and design.

The move comes in the week after New York State voters approved a $2.9 billion transportation bond act that provided $450 million for the Second Avenue subway. The next step for the authority is to approach the Federal Transit Administration for an agreement that would secure support for the project. The authority wants the agency, part of the United States Department of Transportation, to pay about one-third of the total cost.

A subway line under Second Avenue has been an unfulfilled wish since 1929, when it was proposed as a replacement for the Second and Third Avenue elevated lines, which were later demolished. State voters have approved new debt to support the project before, in 1951 and 1967, and tunneling began in 1972. It was halted a few years later by the fiscal crisis.

The project's latest incarnation began in 2000, when the authority pledged $1.05 billion to revive the effort. Planners believe the new line would relieve congestion on the Nos. 4, 5 and 6 lines, which run under Lexington Avenue and are among the most crowded in the system.

To complete the first segment by 2012, the authority will have to move quickly. Officials said yesterday that they hope to award actual construction work by the end of next year - even though the final design could take until 2008 to complete. The biggest task is boring a two-track tunnel.

"We're focused on the first contract, which is the tunnel, and we've got to take it from there," said William M. Wheeler Jr., the authority's planning director. "We've been doing preliminary design for quite some time now. We've taken it to a very significant level."

In a letter to members of the authority's finance and capital construction committees, which gave preliminary approval to the design work yesterday, Mysore L. Nagaraja, the engineer who oversees the authority's biggest construction projects, confirmed that the authority would use a traditional construction procedure, known as design-bid-build.Under the procedure, which has been used for most major infrastructure projects in the last 50 years, the agency draws or commissions exact specifications and then bids the work out to contractors, who execute the plans. The agency is then responsible for any changes resulting from adjustments to the plans, but the changes can be costly.

Mr. Nagaraja's staff earlier considered another procedure, known as design-build, in which the authority and its engineering consultants would have limited themselves to preliminary designs, leaving it to the builder to fulfill a set of general requirements.

The design-build procedure is often faster and more flexible than the traditional method, and is more widely accepted by large construction firms than by small contractors, said Thomas R. Warne, a former executive director of the Utah Department of Transportation and an expert in civil engineering and highway projects.

The authority's decision to use the traditional process will likely mean greater control over the finished product but also runs the risk of cost overruns.

ablarc

November 16th, 2005, 12:06 PM

The authority's decision to use the traditional process will likely mean greater control over the finished product but also runs the risk of cost overruns.
...and delays.

Ninjahedge

November 16th, 2005, 01:59 PM

Risk?

How about guarantee!

NO government project of this size has ever come off w/o an overrun or hitch.

they really need to break this into smaller bits and chomp them off one at a time. Start building up from 63rd street and provide rail switches at each station to allow a switchback for trains to go in the other direction.

This way, when you only build 4 stops after spending $12B you have 4 FINISHED stops, and not a half built homeless shelter.

TonyO

November 16th, 2005, 02:26 PM

NY Newsday

Light at end of 2nd Ave. tunnel

Construction on the long-awaited Second Ave. subway could finally be just down the track.
"Hopefully, we will have shovels in the ground by spring," MTA spokesman Tom Kelly said yesterday as an agency committee approved awarding a contract for the final design of the first segment.

The project, first formally proposed in 1929, received a much-needed boost earlier this month when voters approved a $2.9 billion bond act that will generate $450 million for the first new subway line in decades.

The first leg is slated to run from 96th to 63rd Sts. and connect with the Broadway line.

Meanwhile, a tax bill that would put $727 million or more toward building a $6 billion rail link between lower Manhattan and Kennedy Airport cleared the U.S. Senate Finance Committee yesterday. The aid would come in the form of tax credits.

"I look forward to this bill being approved by the full Senate, and call upon the House to act in concert with the Senate and help secure this important funding," Gov. Pataki said.

Paul D. Colford

Originally published on November 16, 2005

Ed007Toronto

November 16th, 2005, 03:57 PM

I always wondered why there's always talk of rail links to JFK but not to LaGuardia. Wouldn't it be easy to extend the N and W? Has there been talk of this?

TonyO

November 16th, 2005, 04:56 PM

I always wondered why there's always talk of rail links to JFK but not to LaGuardia. Wouldn't it be easy to extend the N and W? Has there been talk of this?

Giuliani had proposed this but it was dropped just as he was leaving office. Someday this will happen, but the problem here is strong community opposition and LGA serves far fewer flights and passengers than JFK or EWR - the return on the investment isn't there by comparison.

TomAuch

November 16th, 2005, 05:29 PM

I just want to tear my hair out whenever I hear about how thing subway MAY be built but then delays come. Midtown near the East River and the Lower East Side could sure use their own subway...hmm, lets actually BUILD one for a change.

NewYorkYankee

November 16th, 2005, 09:29 PM

The Lexington line is always crowded, its unreal sometimes. I never really thought I'd get pushed (Literally!) in the subway. I was wrong.

NIMBYkiller

November 17th, 2005, 12:22 AM

The reason the N/W LGA extension died was because Astoria residents along the 2 blocks of residential streets that the el would have extended along refused to accept it.

I think they should just cut the el back a stop or two, and start to sink it from there. That way they can pass under the neighborhood, then rise back up above the ground in the industrial area. Also, LGA may serve less flights overall, but it serves FAR more "commuter" flights that business travelers use. Having a subway line from LGA is a great idea, IMO.

As for JFK rail line...any chance of a one seat rail service from JFK to Manhattan was killed when they decided to build Airtrain instead of trying to convince the MTA to build the subway extension to the airport.

ablarc

November 17th, 2005, 06:41 AM

As for JFK rail line...any chance of a one seat rail service from JFK to Manhattan was killed when they decided to build Airtrain instead of trying to convince the MTA to build the subway extension to the airport.
Is that Airtrain used by significant numbers who aren't airport workers?

I keep thinking of London's great Gatwick Express: 90 mph trains every 15 minutes Why can't New York do things like that?

TLOZ Link5

November 17th, 2005, 01:17 PM

I keep thinking of London's great Gatwick Express: 90 mph trains every 15 minutes Why can't New York do things like that?

I suppose that part of the problem is that London has the distinction of being the capital of the UK, so it has enough political clout to secure funding for its transportation projects easily. New York, though the largest city, is not the capital and is at the mercy of the federal government's whim; DC, meanwhile, gets almost six dollars in federal aid for every tax dollar it pays and has built the second- or third-busiest mass transit system in the country, complete with rail connections to the airports (a new 20+ mile extension of the Orange Line to Dulles is also being planned), in a couple of decades.

ablarc

November 17th, 2005, 03:08 PM

I suppose that part of the problem is that London has the distinction of being the capital of the UK, so it has enough political clout to secure funding for its transportation projects easily. New York, though the largest city, is not the capital and is at the mercy of the federal government's whim...
Well, that answers the question but it also demonstrates another reason: resignation and acceptance of the status quo. Hard to get progress out of that combination.

ZippyTheChimp

November 17th, 2005, 03:27 PM

I think high speed rail connections to the metro airports are unnecessary. It is less than 15 miles from JFK to Manhattan; the time savings would hardly be worth the expense.

What is necessary is a dedicated airport line. Subway connections to LGA would be an improvement, but subways are not meant to handle passengers with luggage.

TonyO

November 17th, 2005, 04:59 PM

I think high speed rail connections to the metro airports are unnecessary. It is less than 15 miles from JFK to Manhattan; the time savings would hardly be worth the expense.

Never thought of that, good point. But the hour trip on the A train to JFK right now from midtown is unacceptable in a world class city especially since it is less than 15 miles.

What is necessary is a dedicated airport line. Subway connections to LGA would be an improvement, but subways are not meant to handle passengers with luggage.

Even dedicated lines would use existing tracks, as the JFK line would. The LGA extension of the N would make much more sense than an entirely new dedicated transit to serve it. LGA is too small for that.

Subways are fine with reasonable amounts of luggage. If you have more, take a cab or car service.

Ninjahedge

November 18th, 2005, 08:55 AM

Never thought of that, good point. But the hour trip on the A train to JFK right now from midtown is unacceptable in a world class city especially since it is less than 15 miles.

Even dedicated lines would use existing tracks, as the JFK line would. The LGA extension of the N would make much more sense than an entirely new dedicated transit to serve it. LGA is too small for that.

Subways are fine with reasonable amounts of luggage. If you have more, take a cab or car service.

Subway: $2
Cab: $35

Yeah, easy switch there Zip.... ;)

NIMBYkiller

November 18th, 2005, 12:17 PM

From what I've heard, there are a decent amount of people using Airtrain. I was intending on using when I went to PR, but my mom ended up being able to drive me to the airport instead.

I think the best way to make a one seat ride at this point would be a ferry, but even that wouldn't get people all the way to the terminal buildings. You'd have to take a shuttle bus to the ferry terminal. But it would probably be the fastest way to Manhattan. NY Airport Express bus is expensive and I think the trip times are a little long. A train is forever. Airtrain->LIRR is pretty good, but again, it's $7. Then again, I doubt the ferry will be much cheaper than that.

LGA is planned to have its ferry service reinstated soon. I think the stops are to be 34th St and Pier 11. They should really consider building a ferry terminal somewhere between 59th and 63rd sts, as well as reinstate ferry service to Atlantic Av in Brooklyn(with a shuttle bus of course to Metrotech)

For plans on a far more grand scheme.....There's a guy posting by the name of Rail Blue on subchat. He proposed a major Airtrain expansion. This is the ONLY Airtrain expansion I support. It would extend the system up to LGA. There'd be a line from LGA to Flushing LIRR station. The line would continue from LGA down to the planned LIRR Sunnyside Station(which is adjacent to the Queens Plaza(or is it the QueensBORO Plaza? It's the one without the 7, N, or W...but they should try to find a way to connect them all with walkways)) subway station. From there, if possible, over the 59th St Bridge and into the abandonned trolley terminal at 59th/2nd. If it can't go over the bridge, maybe under, and then up into the trolley terminal.

TonyO

February 8th, 2006, 07:30 AM

Funding for Second Avenue Subway, East Side Access Said To Be on Track

By BRADLEY HOPE, Special to the Sun

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority is only months away from reaching "full funding grant agreements" with the federal government for the city's East Side Access and Second Avenue subway projects, MTA and Federal Transit Administration officials said yesterday.

Combined with last November's bond act and the funds earmarked in the city and state budgets, the funding agreements would guarantee the two projects would have sufficient money to begin the first phases of construction. The news marks a drastic change from this time last year, when the projects seemed to be slipping further into the future as the MTA pondered how to come up with enough of the billions needed to lock in federal funds.

The idea of a Second Avenue subway line has been toyed with by the MTA since 1929, but a long series of setbacks, including the Great Depression, has delayed the project for nearly three quarters of a century. The line would eventually span the length of Manhattan, from 125th Street to Hanover Square. The proposed East Side Access project would link Long Island Rail Road passengers to Grand Terminal Station with a 3.5-mile tunnel under Manhattan's East Side.

The FTA announced that President Bush had added its funding recommendations for major transit projects across the country into his 2007 budget proposal. Mr. Bush is recommending Congress ratify $1.5 billion of funding for 28 projects, of which $300 million would go to the East Side Access project. An MTA deputy executive director, Christopher Boylan, said the amount is one of the biggest earmarks in the history of the program. When added to the federal grants in the last two years, the total amount devoted to the project by the federal government is almost $1 billion, he said.

The Second Avenue subway project is still in preliminary consideration for a funding agreement, so no amount has been set for fiscal year 2007. The project will have to vie for its share of $102 million set aside for projects still in initial discussions with the FTA. Four other major metropolitan projects in the country are also contending for the funds.

"The MTA is really in a position to break ground on these projects in the next years," a vice president at Regional Plan Association, Jeremy Soffin, said.

The FTA and MTA are still hammering out financial arrangements, safety, security, and scheduling, among other issues, Mr. Boylan said. He said it will be a "matter of months" before an agreement is reached for East Side Access, with an agreement for the Second Avenue subway to follow soon after.

If the agreements go through, the FTA is expected to pay for about a third of the total costs of each project.

Although neither project has entered the final design phase of planning, a requirement for full funding grant agreements, MTA officials have said they want to start construction on the Second Avenue subway at the end of this year. Initial construction has already begun on East Side Access.

The Secretary of Transportation, Norman Mineta, yesterday emphasized the necessity of relieving traffic congestion across the country through mass transit initiatives, including bus rapid transit and expansion of commuter rails.

"As a nation choked with congestion, we must turn to transit as one way to make it easier and faster to get to work, relieve crowded roads, and keep our economy moving," he said. "An investment in transit is an investment in fighting congestion."

In his budget proposal, Mr. Bush has planned for another $303 million to go to five new projects in four states in the Southwest and Oregon, including a 21-mile extension of the Dallas Light Rail system and an eight mile extension of Portland's "MAX" light rail line. About $572 million is proposed to continue funding 16 projects for which the FTA already has long-term agreements with.

NYatKNIGHT

February 8th, 2006, 10:49 AM

It's been said before, I'll believe it when I ride it.

TLOZ Link5

February 8th, 2006, 12:16 PM

It's been said before, I'll believe it when I ride it.

Heh, yes. Considering that it's the Second Avenue Subway, you have to continue to be skeptical even when shovels are in the ground.

TonyO

February 8th, 2006, 02:25 PM

Funds for a Grand plan?

Feds urge backing of E. Side line

BY PETE DONOHUE
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER

The Long Island Rail Road's extension into Grand Central Terminal is close to getting a long-term funding commitment from the federal government, officials said yesterday.
Meanwhile, the Federal Transit Administration is recommending the MTA receive $300million for the so-called East Side Access project further down the track.

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority is seeking more than $2 billion in federal funds for the $7.7 billion project, according to federal reports.

Transit Administration officials said during a press conference in Washington that the MTA's case for longtime federal support was bolstered by the voter referendum that authorized the state to sell bonds to generate $450 million for construction.

"That was a very successful contribution to advancing this project," David Vozzolo, Transit Administration deputy associate administrator, said.

The MTA projects the extension will be completed in 2012 and will draw an average 163,000 riders a day. Supporters say it will speed the commutes of many who work on the East Side but have to travel by train to Penn Station and then double back by subway.

It's also seen as necessary for the region's economic vitality along with the Second Ave. subway. The Transit Administration said the latter project is on track for a full funding agreement with the feds, which provides significant funding to see that projects are completed.

The Second Ave. subway is also expected to share in a smaller pool of funds of about $100 million with a handful of other projects.

"This funding shows that the [Bush] administration and the Department of Transportation have renewed their commitment to seeing these critical New York projects through until they are built," Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said.

"Both East Side Access and the Second Ave. subway will meet commuter needs that have existed for far too long here in New York.

These funds will help Long Island and New York City improve transportation options and spur economic growth in the process," Schumer said.

The MTA, which doesn't put financing charges in its tabulations, says the LIRR extension will cost $6.3 billion.

Originally published on February 8, 2006

antinimby

February 8th, 2006, 04:21 PM

Heh, yes. Considering that it's the Second Avenue Subway, you have to continue to be skeptical even when shovels are in the ground.Ha, shovels in the ground? You people are too kind. Remember the groundbreaking ceremonies at Ground Zero. What about the Harlem hotel project? In NYC, only believe it when it's up and running and it works. Otherwise, don't even believe a word of it.

ZippyTheChimp

February 8th, 2006, 04:32 PM

It's been said before, I'll believe it when I ride it.Don't throw away your bicycle.

The Second Ave. subway is also expected to share in a smaller pool of funds of about $100 million with a handful of other projects. I envision a 2000 ft tunnel plugged at the end for a few decades.

ablarc

February 8th, 2006, 08:27 PM

I think high speed rail connections to the metro airports are unnecessary. It is less than 15 miles from JFK to Manhattan; the time savings would hardly be worth the expense.

What is necessary is a dedicated airport line. Subway connections to LGA would be an improvement, but subways are not meant to handle passengers with luggage.
As you know, New York's three airports are maxed out. Stewart International in Newburgh seems promising as the city's fourth airport (London has five), but only if a high-speed dedicated train (not a subway) serves it. It's so far away and the Thruway's so often clogged that only such a service would make it a serious contender as New York City's newest airport.

(Sorry if this is off-topic but the subject's already lodged in this thread. Maybe it belongs somewhere else.)

Oh, and I agree with you about the SAS; I'll probably pass through those pearly gates before I ever see a Second Avenue turnstile.

ZippyTheChimp

February 8th, 2006, 08:47 PM

There's a thread on the need for a fourth metro airport.

TonyO

February 9th, 2006, 09:19 PM

The Real Deal
February 2006

Aboveground rumblings as subway project starts rolling

Long sought, Second Avenue subway line will cause short-term pain and long-term gain for real estate

By Jeremy Smerd

Proposed Second Avenue subway line, which includes extending the Q line northward. The Second Avenue subway has long been called the greatest transportation project that's never been built.

The passage of the transportation bond act in November, however, which included $450 million for the subway line's first phase, means that enough state and federal funding has been secured to make that dream a reality, and perhaps, then, reshape the real estate above its planned route.

Construction of the $3.8 billion first phase of the subway line - which will run from 105th to 63rd streets and be completed in 2011 - is expected to begin sometime this year.

The new subway will mean a long-term boom in real estate prices for properties east of Second Avenue, real estate and transportation experts say. But it will come at the expense of short-term pain for owners whose properties will be affected during the construction phase, as well as the properties that will be partially acquired by the MTA through the use of eminent domain.

Then, too, there may be a toll on the businesses on Second Avenue, not all of which will survive the effects of five years of construction on customer traffic.

Historically, mass transit projects have improved property values in the communities served by public transportation, according to the American Public Transportation Association, an industry group.

This will no doubt be true for the Upper East Side, an area that has the highest density residential zoning in the city and the most crowded subway line running along Lexington Avenue. That line carries 1.3 million riders each weekday - more than the combined ridership of San Francisco, Chicago, and Boston's transit systems, according to the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. The Second Avenue subway will relieve congestion, making the Upper East Side, in general, a neighborhood better served by public transportation.

The first phase of the new subway, which will extend the Q line northward, will immediately reduce crowding on the Lexington Avenue line by nearly half and make the walk to the subway less than 10 minutes on average for anyone east of Second Avenue. The result could be a 20 percent to 25 percent jump in value for those properties, according to research by the transportation association, a number that conforms to the practical experience of real estate brokers.

"People are always willing to spend more the closer they are to transportation because of the convenience," said Gordon Golub, the manager of the Upper East Side office of Citi Habitats.

Consider the difference between a one-bedroom apartment in the East 70s between Lexington and Third avenues (renting around $3,400 a month) and the same-sized apartment between First and York Avenues (which rents for about $2,800 a month), an indication of the impact the subway line could have on property values.

For sellers, that difference amounts to about $100 a square foot, increasing the closer you get to Central Park.

Golub said he has seen fewer apartments and buildings east of Third Avenue for sale recently, which he attributes to anticipation of the Second Avenue subway.

It's possible that buyers and sellers of entire buildings, too, are factoring in the arrival of the Second Avenue subway. River East, a building at 92nd Street and First Avenue, for example, has changed hands three times in the last 24 months, a sign that interest in East Side properties may be piqued.

"It would make me believe that whoever is the most recent owner would certainly be considering the value of the building based upon how close it is or will be to transportation," Golub said.

Of course, while long-term real estate values may increase, there will be short-term pain for those properties along Second Avenue. Residents are doing everything they can to mitigate the inevitable disruption that will occur, including a task force created by Community Board 8 that is made up of elected officials and residents who plan on working closely with the MTA during construction.

Residents might have reason to worry, based on past attempts to build the Second Avenue subway. In the early 1970s, the MTA began boring tunnels between 120th and 110th streets and 105th and 99th streets for the subway. The project was abandoned during the city's fiscal crisis.

By the 1980s, with the subway system in disrepair, all expansion projects were put on hold. The tunnels were eventually covered over with asphalt, but, as the MTA's Final Environmental Impact Statement published in May 2004 states, buildings nearby suffered foundational damage. Residents, like State Assemblyman Alexander B. "Pete" Grannis, simply recall the inconvenience of having an open construction site.

"It was extraordinarily disruptive, especially to the small shops that lined Second Avenue that, in many cases, never recovered," he said.

Technology has eased some engineering concerns. The MTA will use mining drills to bore through subterranean rock, instead of the old "cut and cover" technique.

Still, for many of those living or working above future stations - which will mirror those on the Lexington Avenue line - and ventilation shafts, the short-term inconvenience outweighs the potential long-term gain.

Though nothing has been finalized, including when and where construction will begin, and which buildings will be affected, a spokesman for the MTA, Tom Kelly, said the authority has cited parts of buildings along Second Avenue that it is seeking to gain rights to. Residents of one of the buildings, a co-op at 301 East 69th Street, have been vociferous in their opposition. Co-op members were not available for comment, but Assembly member Grannis said the community intends "to be involved" in the building process.

But, like virtually every other project that is fought by the community "the worst case predictions don't actually materialize," he said. "Once it's completed and the passion of the battle is past, there will be no long-term negative effects, and the subway will have a substantial positive effect on property values along this corridor."

Transportation experts are confident that building the first phase will ensure the construction of the remainder of the line, which will run 8.5 miles from Lower Manhattan to 125th Street in East Harlem and cost about $16 billion to complete. For property owners, residents, and businesses, the first phase, for better or for worse, will be a taste of what's to come.

ablarc

February 9th, 2006, 09:42 PM

Technology has eased some engineering concerns. The MTA will use mining drills to bore through subterranean rock, instead of the old "cut and cover" technique.
Will they make use of the cut and cover sections already built? And how will the transition to deep bore be accomplished? Will the tracks descend at that point?

mkeit

February 10th, 2006, 01:52 PM

They will use the sections in Harlem. The tunnel under the Manhattan Bridge Plaza is too shallow under the current design and might be used for equipment.

The MTA website has the EIS undert " Planning Studies" with plans, details and maps.

TonyO

April 4th, 2006, 02:07 PM

NY1

Residents Express Concerns Over 2nd Avenue Subway

April 04, 2006

While it's still only in the initial planning stages, residents are already raising concerns over the Second Avenue subway project.

The MTA said the Second Avenue subway line is moving forward as planned at a community board meeting Monday night.

The project will be built in phases: the first portion is an extension of the Q line, between 96th and 63rd Streets, which should be completed by 2012, but MTA officials said residential buildings could be demolished by 2008 to make way for the line.

That came as bad news to many residents.

"There are people in my own building who've lived in these apartments for 30 years, and for them that's serious uprooting," said an area resident.

"I think this will be very destructive to the Upper East Side. I think it will change the face of the Upper East Side forever," added another area resident.

Eventually, the MTA plans to have the Second Avenue line extend all the way down the east side of Manhattan to the Financial District.

For now, that lower portion is being called the T line.

Ed007Toronto

April 4th, 2006, 06:35 PM

Good news that they are moving forward (albeit really slowly) on this. Its been needed for a long time.

ablarc

April 4th, 2006, 08:06 PM

How many buildings do they have to demolish, and why?

mkeit

April 5th, 2006, 01:37 PM

Each station requires two entrances and ventillation buildings. They will not use street entrances like the existing system ; instead they will be off-street, insde buildings like at 63 and Lex.

Several buildings were designed with these entrances in mind-New apartment buildings at 34th Street and Houston St all have provisions.

The EIS on the MTA web site lists all of the buildings-there are alot. Some are empty and waiting for demo-the SE corner of 23rd St.

ablarc

April 5th, 2006, 02:39 PM

They will not use street entrances like the existing system ; instead they will be off-street, insde buildings...
Why?

mkeit

April 6th, 2006, 01:38 PM

All of the entraces will have elevators and escalators, along with stairs. They require more space.

I won't disclose publicly, but drop me an email at sean@nycexposed.com I can take you if you want.

TonyO

April 17th, 2006, 11:19 AM

FEDS FINALLY ABOARD 2ND AVENUE $UBWAY

By GEOFF EARLE Post Correspondent

April 17, 2006 -- WASHINGTON - The feds have green-lighted the long-awaited Second Avenue subway, The Post has learned.
The Federal Transit Administration plans to announce today that the massive project's first $5 billion section "meets the criteria" for going into "final development" - Washingtonspeak for approval of the initiative.

With this new OK, design and engineering contractors can start spending the $1.3 billion in federal funds set aside for the first phase of a transit line that eventually will run from East Harlem to the Financial District.

"The wheels are turning on the Second Avenue subway project, that's for sure," said Rep. Carolyn Maloney, who represents the East Side. "This is another sign of the progress we're making."

The next step: breaking ground. The hope is that the first leg, from 63rd to 96th streets, will be ready for use by 2012.

While supporters see the new approval as the light at the end of a long tunnel, New York's congressional delegation will have to fight each year to ensure that the funding is provided. The state is kicking in $450 million, and the Metropolitan Transit Authority $3 billion.

The FTA told Congress this month that it planned to issue the go-ahead after a 10-day notice. A document revealing the decision was obtained by The Post.

The project is aimed at relieving overcrowding on the No. 4, 5, and 6 trains, which all run along Lexington Avenue - the East Side's only subway line.

The feds estimate that the first phase will take six to 12 years to complete. They also predict that, when completed in 2030, the new line will save riders a collective 62,300 hours per weekday by cutting their walk and transfer times.

In 2012, the feds say, the MTA will be able to extend the uptown Q train from its current terminus at 57th Street and Seventh Avenue to Second Avenue stations at 72nd, 86th and 96th Street. At first, riders will be able to head downtown by switching to the Lexington line at 63rd or taking the new line to lower Manhattan along Broadway.

Eventually, the line will run 81/2 miles through its own tunnel down the East Side, from 125th Street to Hanover Square. The feds estimate the full project to cost in excess of $13 billion.

The idea of a Second Avenue subway is hardly new - it was first proposed in 1929.

The project is aimed at relieving overcrowding on the No. 4, 5, and 6 trains, which all run along Lexington Avenue - the East Side's only subway line.

The feds estimate that the first phase will take six to 12 years to complete. They also predict that, when completed in 2030, the new line will save riders a collective 62,300 hours per weekday by cutting their walk and transfer times.

Maybe i'm going out on a limb here, but wouldn't 25 years be enough time for real-estate developers to, at least in part, catch up with the increase in transit capacity?

nick-taylor

April 19th, 2006, 06:42 AM

24 years for 8.5miles? Thats what - 1.5m progress each day (and every day)!

ablarc

April 19th, 2006, 07:11 AM

24 years for 8.5miles? Thats what - 1.5m progress each day (and every day)!
And not only that, but some of the tunnel already exists!

And furthermore, it's bound to straggle home several years late.

And if the past is any indication, it'll be abandoned unfinished.

50-50 that anyone on this board will get to ride it in his or her lifetime; we don't build them at the pace of London.

But our taxes are lower, for what it's worth.

Gregory Tenenbaum

April 19th, 2006, 10:21 AM

50-50 that anyone on this board will get to ride it in his or her lifetime; we don't build them at the pace of London.

M.T.A. officials are now planning to begin building the Second Ave. line within the next year and plan to open new stops at 96th, 86th, and 72nd Sts. and connect the new trains to the existing Q train by 2012.

First 2nd Ave.stops would connect with Downtown

By Josh Rogers

If the seventh decade proves to be the charm and fruitful work on the Second Ave. actually begins soon, Downtowners will get new service in the first phase of the project and will not have to wait yet another decade or two before they see any benefits.

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority cleared a hurdle in Washington D.C. this week and hopes to resume the long-delayed project by the end of this year or early next year. The M.T.A. gave up the idea of building a scaled down version of the line just on the Upper East Side some time ago, but after that decision was changed, officials continued to say those stops would be built first and were relatively quiet about the Downtown component of the first phase.

The M.T.A. hopes to finish the first phase in 2012 and it will allow Upper East Side commuters (at 96th, 86th or 72nd Sts.) to get on an expanded Q-line which will follow the current Q route down to Canal St. and on to Brooklyn. The trip to Lower Manhattan is likely to be faster on the Q’s Broadway line than the full Second Ave. line – the T – because commuters will be able to get to Canal St. in six stops from E. 72nd St. on the Q route and seven or eight stops on the T train depending on whether riders get off at Grand and Chrystie Sts. or Chatham Square – the stations closest to Canal.

U.S. Rep. Carolyn Maloney, one of the strongest backers of the line, said about 200,000 riders are expected to use the Q-Second Ave. line the first day it opens, perhaps in six years. One of them may be Amelie Thurston, 27, a straphanger who was waiting for a Brooklyn-bound Q on Canal Tuesday. (She’ll be counted twice that day in 2012 if she takes a roundtrip.)

Thurston said she has heard a little about the Second Ave. line but has not followed developments closely since it seemed a long way off. She did not know it would connect with the Q, but said she thought she would ride this new line most days.

“I have heard about it, but I haven’t researched it or anything,” she said. “It’ll be done when it’s done.”

The Second Ave. el was torn down in 1942 and East Siders are now halfway through their seventh decade of waiting for a new train line. Bill Wheeler, the M.T.A.’s director of planning, said he understands the skepticism, but this time the agency will have the $3.8 billion to build the first phase, and by linking to Downtown in the beginning, it means a viable line can open before the 15-year project is done.

“You get benefits right away,” Wheeler said in a telephone interview. He said Washington was reluctant to pay for a plan that would take so long to pay off. The Partnership for New York City, a group of business leaders, released a report 21/2 years ago saying the Second Ave. project should be a lower priority in part because the M.T.A. was not planning to open it in phases at that time.

The project’s intent is to relieve the severe overcrowding on the Lexington line on the Upper East Side and provide service to people living and working in neighborhoods near the East River including parts of Chinatown, the Lower East Side and the Financial District.

Wheeler, Maloney and other Second Ave. advocates were happy this week because the federal government moved the project into the final design stage. The M.T.A. is expected to invest $2.5 billion, and Washington $1.3 billion to cover the first phase of the project.

“Final design means you can get the design ready for real bids,” Wheeler said of the federal decision. “It means they’re as serious as we are about the job.”

Maloney said the subway project battle has spanned her entire 14-year career in Congress and has been her toughest. “Given the starts and stops, starts and stops they want to make sure we’re going to do it,” she said. Maloney thinks they never would have gotten this far if not for the work of Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, who once held up the state budget until the M.T.A. committed to the full build line.

“Shelly and I are not going to stop,” Maloney said, in explaining why she thinks the line will be built soon. She said the pair has joined with Manhattan borough president Scott Stringer to form a task force to make sure the M.T.A. does not shift the project’s money to other places.

In the 1970s, the M.T.A. started building Second Ave. tunnels, but construction stopped because of the city’s fiscal crisis. Wheeler said there was no plan to open the project in phases then, so canceling was not a difficult decision because it was such a long-term, expensive project.

Wheeler said the Q express tunnel has enough tunnel capacity to accommodate the extra trains that may start coming from the Upper East Side starting in 2012. He said the tunnel connecting Canal St. to the four R,W local stops in the Financial District is pretty busy and probably couldn’t accommodate too many Q trains, but if ridership demand increases at those stops in the next few years, the M.T.A. could consider extending the Q to Downtown stops south of Canal St. in the first phase.

The second phase is likely to connect the line between 125th and 96th Sts. and will have a Metro-North transfer, Wheeler said. The third phase will run from 72nd St. to Houston St. and the last one from Houston St. to Hanover Square, with stops in between at Grand St., Chatham Square and the Seaport. If a planned rail link connecting Lower Manhattan with J.F.K. Airport and the Long Island Rail Road is built, it will also allow for the Second Ave. T to be extended into Brooklyn through the link’s new tunnel.

Speaker Silver, whose district includes Chinatown and the Lower East Side, has always been concerned that the M.T.A. would never build the Downtown portion if the money ran out. In an interview with Downtown Express two years ago, he said he was even willing to block the entire project unless the M.T.A. agreed to do construction work Downtown in the first phase.

A Silver spokesperson said Wednesday that the speaker is willing to accept Washington’s insistence on phasing the project, so long as the entire line gets built.

“The Q-line is an interim step to qualify for federal funding,” said the spokesperson, Jim Quent. “The speaker remains committed to the full build of the Second Ave. subway.”

Maloney, whose eastern district includes some of the Lower East Side, said many New Yorkers will reap the benefits of the new line including Maloney herself, particularly when she meets Downtown constituents on winery nights in meetings far away from subway stops.

“Before you and I die,” she said, “let’s get this complete.”

http://www.downtownexpress.com/de_154/first2ndave.html

Scruffy88

April 25th, 2006, 11:50 PM

Am i correct in understanding that this line will end at 105th street?

antinimby

April 26th, 2006, 12:05 AM

^ No, looks like it'll go beyond that.

http://www.downtownexpress.com/de_154/map.gif

Scruffy88

April 26th, 2006, 12:23 AM

brilliant. that was going to be my suggestion to have it end at 125 st. boy my commute to work will be so much quicker. that is if i still have the same job 2050. oh and if im still alive. i'd be 70

MrSpice

June 23rd, 2006, 10:11 AM

Any news about the Second Avenue Subway project? Does anyone know when they are going to start digging the tunnels and putting up subway stations along 2nd Avenue?

Eugenious

June 23rd, 2006, 10:39 AM

Any news about the Second Avenue Subway project? Does anyone know when they are going to start digging the tunnels and putting up subway stations along 2nd Avenue?

Not anytime soon :) Atleast not untill 2008, if they open any part of it by 2012 I'll eat my tie.

ASchwarz

June 23rd, 2006, 11:04 AM

Not anytime soon :) Atleast not untill 2008, if they open any part of it by 2012 I'll eat my tie.

2007 is the start date.

MrSpice

June 23rd, 2006, 11:33 AM

The reason I am asking is because I heard that this fall they will start the work and the Rainbow store on the corner of 94th Street and 2nd Avenue will soon close to make way for one of the entrances. I think the 2008 guess is certainly wrong. It's definitely happening earlier because I live in the Yorkville area and there have been several cumminity board and MTA meeting devoted to pending changes and expected dalays and problems.

pianoman11686

July 12th, 2006, 10:12 PM

From http://cityrealty.com/new_developments:

Upper East Side board looks at Second Avenue Subway plans 12-JUL-06

Last night the Second Avenue Subway Task Force of Community Board 8, which represents the Upper East Side in Manhattan, hosted a presentation by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority of its proposed construction of a Second Avenue subway.

The long-delayed project is designed to alleviate overcrowding on the Lexington Avenue Subway and make subways more accessible to the far east areas of the Upper East Side. The new line will run from 125th Street to Hanover Square in Lower Manhattan with construction in four phases.

Last night’s meeting focused on the first phase, which is to include new stations from 96th connecting to the existing station at 63rd and Lexington and will also involve cutting into Second Avenue between 95th and 91st streets to insert the tunnel burrowing machine (TBM) needed to create the subway line. The Design Manager for the project described the machine as being “like a giant earthworm, and said that it is 22 feet in diameter.

Some members of the community felt that this area was taking a “major beating” in the proposed plan as the above-ground work is expected to impact residents and businesses for 18 months during construction. The MTA representatives responded that the area was picked as the site for the initial excavation because the soil in the area was ideal compared to others in the “geographical profile” of the proposed route.

The MTA representatives said that sidewalks may be reduced to a width as narrow as 7 feet so that automobile traffic can still be accommodated on the avenue. During the above-ground construction phase, building awnings and canopies, public telephones, fruit stands and sidewalk cafes that lie within the construction zone will have to be removed.
In addition, MTA plans to close some side streets in order to create temporary “delivery loading zones” for businesses during rush hour and then keep those streets open during subsequent hours of the day.

According to Chapter 12 of the submitted Final Environmental Impact Statement (FEIS), noise from the construction will be monitored and controlled by means of noise dampening equipment, and the noise is not allowed to exceed five decibels above the “ambient noise level.”

In 1995, the MTA began a Manhattan East Side Alternatives (MESA) Study and the MTA Board allocated $1.05 billion in its 2000-2004 Capital Program to complete the planning design and initiate construction and in April, 2004 a final environmental impact statement (FEIS) was published for the project and the very lengthy document can be viewed at http://www.mta.nyc.us/capconstr/sas/index.html under the “Documents & Presentations” section.

Numerous area residents at the meeting at the New York Blood Center maintained that the FEIS needs to be updated because of significant recent real estate activity in the vicinity of the project and many others expressed concerns about compensation for lost business revenues, noise, pest control and building safety.

Community Board 8 will hold another meeting about the huge project in the fall.

Under a best case scenario, the new subway line is expected to be completed about 2014.

http://www.cityrealty.com/graphics/uploads/1152735217_mtasecond2.gif

lofter1

July 12th, 2006, 11:24 PM

Great how that map ^^ makes it look like its farther from 23rd to 14th than from 14th to Houston :confused: :mad: :confused: :mad: :confused:

stache

July 13th, 2006, 05:06 AM

Maybe this has been covered before, are these the same number of subway stops as when this project began in the '60's ?

TonyO

July 25th, 2006, 08:35 AM

NY Daily News
7/25/06

Second Ave. line inches forward

A key transit committee authorized the MTA yesterday to obtain the first batch of properties needed for the long-awaited Second Ave. subway line.
The planning and real estate committee gave the green light for negotiations with the owners of 16 properties on Second Ave., between 95th and 63rd Sts. The committee also approved eminent domain proceedings if negotiations fail. The MTA board is expected to pass the measure tomorrow.

No tenants or businesses would be forced out by these initial moves, MTA officials said.

For the most part, the MTA wants access to underground vaults and other subterranean spaces to dig excavation shafts. The agency also needs a site to launch a giant tunnel-boring machine. "This is great news," Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-Manhattan) said. "New York straphangers should take heart: The Second Ave. subway is coming." Construction, including tunneling, is slated to start next year.

The first leg of the subway would run between 125th and 63rd Sts., where it would connect to the Broadway line and head downtown.

MrSpice

July 25th, 2006, 10:46 AM

NY Daily News
7/25/06

Second Ave. line inches forward

A key transit committee authorized the MTA yesterday to obtain the first batch of properties needed for the long-awaited Second Ave. subway line.
The planning and real estate committee gave the green light for negotiations with the owners of 16 properties on Second Ave., between 95th and 63rd Sts. The committee also approved eminent domain proceedings if negotiations fail. The MTA board is expected to pass the measure tomorrow.

No tenants or businesses would be forced out by these initial moves, MTA officials said.

For the most part, the MTA wants access to underground vaults and other subterranean spaces to dig excavation shafts. The agency also needs a site to launch a giant tunnel-boring machine. "This is great news," Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-Manhattan) said. "New York straphangers should take heart: The Second Ave. subway is coming." Construction, including tunneling, is slated to start next year.

The first leg of the subway would run between 125th and 63rd Sts., where it would connect to the Broadway line and head downtown.

I know for sure that the Rainbow store on the corner of 94th Street and 2nd Avenue will be forced out - they plan to build one of the entrances there. So, this small article is not exactly true.

SilentPandaesq

July 25th, 2006, 11:54 AM

Sweet. TBMs rock. I wonder if this whole thing will end up on the discovery channel as an episode of "Extreme Engineering". I can hear that guy's voice now....

Eugenious

July 25th, 2006, 01:25 PM

yawn...everytime they write articles like this I want to take a baseball bat to the head of whoever wrote \it. Construction was supposed to start in 2004, then 2005, then last year they were saying how it could start early-mid 2006! and now they are saying 2007...only a fool would believe that. I bet this whole thing is going to take FAR longer then they predict...there has'nt been a major new subway line construction in a LOOOONG time, the business and landowners as well as residents of east side will make life for MTA as difficult as humanly possible, if you think people living on the east side want the increased traffic, noise etc. your on drugs. Lesson of the story here will be that community boards have WAY too much power on major projects like this, the government needs to come in and tell em: listen we're going to build this line whether you like it or not, get on board or we will take you to court.

stache

July 25th, 2006, 01:58 PM

Well they've said they were going to build this for the last 40 years, it's not like it's a surprise -

MikeW

July 25th, 2006, 02:04 PM

It's interesting that they're using a TBM, and not doing cut and cover. It'll be interesting to see how the link to the segments already built.

Sweet. TBMs rock. I wonder if this whole thing will end up on the discovery channel as an episode of "Extreme Engineering". I can hear that guy's voice now....

SilentPandaesq

July 25th, 2006, 02:26 PM

It's interesting that they're using a TBM, and not doing cut and cover. It'll be interesting to see how the link to the segments already built.

I assumed that it is no longer a good idea to do cut and cover, so I was wondering where they would dig the hole to drop the TBM in. Makes sense to move downtown and just have the TBM cut its way year after year till it gets to the LES.

Linking the segments would be hard - I guess it depends on the Size of the existing segments and the size of the TBM.

tmg

July 25th, 2006, 03:53 PM

TBM and Cut and Cover will both be used, depending on the type of rock they're tunneling through. Details are here:

http://www.mta.info/capconstr/sas/pdf/construction9_3_02.pdf

SilentPandaesq

July 25th, 2006, 04:15 PM

oh I see. cut and cover for softer ground and for the stations - TBM for the harder rock. Those midtown stations and UES ones are going to be tough going. I wonder if they will TBM through the station sites and then cut out the roof and expand the tube to make a station.

ablarc

July 25th, 2006, 04:24 PM

Well they've said they were going to build this for the last 40 years, it's not like it's a surprise -
40 years? More like 80, right?

debris

July 25th, 2006, 04:46 PM

Would it be heresy to suggest they don't build the downtown portion? I mean, can't they just run the R train along with the Q train up 2nd avenue to 125th and Lex, then call it a day? What the hell is the R train doing on the Queens Bvld line anyway, since four trains (G, F, V, E) already run on four tracks, three of which access the west side? Running the R up 2nd avenue would take care of the downtown problem, since you could then take the R from the UES all the way down to Whitehall (and Brooklyn, for that matter). Seems like most of the pressure on the Lex comes from the UES anyway, so problem solved.

I'd much rather see the rest of the money (assuming it ever materalizes) extending the 2nd avenue line into the Bronx, or perhaps across 125th.

TranspoMan

July 25th, 2006, 10:08 PM

What the hell is the R train doing on the Queens Bvld line anyway, since four trains (G, F, V, E) already run on four tracks, three of which access the west side?
The G train only runs during off peak hours, so on weekdays the Queens Blvd line has 4 trains, two express (E,F) and two local (R,V). That is why they want to extend Q train service from the Broadway line to the Second Avenue line and provide service to the Upper East Side.

bkmonkey

August 9th, 2006, 11:13 AM

Would it really be that hard for the second avenue line to be extended to another borough. Although I am from Brooklyn, and I think that a line would be great down Flatbush avenue to Kings Plaza, the city needs a line in Staten Island.

Can you imagine the resulting real estate boom in that borough, and the revenue that the city would make. In the 20's and 30's nyc was forward thinking. We built subway lines anticipating the development that would follow. (in the case queens in paticular). Even a connection to the Staten Island railway would be a tremendous boon for the city.

Any thoughts on this?

pianoman11686

August 9th, 2006, 11:21 AM

Personally, given the traditional reactions of people over there, I'd think that a new subway line there wouldn't be welcomed. Staten Islanders like their relative isolation from the hustle and bustle of the other boroughs; it's the one borough that is mostly suburban, and I think they wanna keep it that way. I know there is a Staten Island railway that runs along the east shore all the way up to the ferry, and I think that's enough for them.

ablarc

August 9th, 2006, 01:44 PM

^ Yeah, but why is Staten Island even a part of New York City?

When did that occur, anyway? And why?

pianoman11686

August 9th, 2006, 01:59 PM

1898 - the consolidation of Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, and Staten Island, along with Manhattan, into the City of New York.

In the Dinkins era, I believe there was a serious movement on Staten Island that advocated secession. Rudy put an end to that.

bkmonkey

August 9th, 2006, 02:02 PM

It happened when New York City won Staten Island from New Jersery in a boatrace. No seriously. New York one the boat race, and it became richmond country, and was incorporated in nyc soon after

However.. Staten Island remains one of the fastest growing boroughs in the city, and although there are some vocal people who enjoy the isolation, many would enjoy an alternitive to the 9 dollar tolls on the bridge, and the 25 min staten island ferry. One subway line would not automatically turn the borough into manhattan, however a subway link would provide an option for those who want to commute, and explore, and thus for future development. This is something that is important to the city. Lets not forget.. that even though Staten Island has a population of 600,000 or so.. that it would be a major city by itself, as well. It is sad, that this borough is not served by a line. Anyway.. i bet people in the other boroughs enjoyed their isolation too (or so it can be argued) before the IRT and BMT were extended.

bkmonkey

August 9th, 2006, 02:03 PM

couldn't the Staten Island railway be connected via tunnel to the second avenue line?

lofter1

August 9th, 2006, 02:03 PM

Staten Island -- particularly the shoreline near the Verrazano -- was always viewed as strategically necessary for the protection of NY Harbor --

ergo SI was claimed as part of NY.

Strategically / Militarily it makes sense. Although when you look on a map it clearly seems that it should be part of NJ.

lofter1

August 9th, 2006, 02:11 PM

It happened when New York City won Staten Island from New Jersery in a boatrace. No seriously. New York one the boat race, and it became richmond country, and was incorporated in nyc soon after.

WTF???

Can you back that up??

Urban lore, methinks ...

Staaten Eylandt

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Staten_Island

The first recorded European (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European) contact with the island was in 1524 by Giovanni da Verrazzano (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giovanni_da_Verrazzano) who sailed through the Narrows (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narrows). In 1609, Henry Hudson (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Hudson) established Dutch (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_Republic) trade in the area and named the island Staaten Eylandt after the Staten-Generaal (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/States-General_of_the_Kingdom_of_the_Netherlands), the Dutch parliament.

Although the first Dutch settlement of the New Netherlands (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Netherland) colony was made on Manhattan (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan) in 1620, Staaten Eylandt remained uncolonized by the Dutch for many decades. From 1639 to 1655, the Dutch made three separate attempts to establish a permanent settlement on the island, but each time the settlement was destroyed in the conflicts between the Dutch and the local tribes.

In 1661, the first permanent Dutch settlement was established at Oude Dorp (Dutch (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_language) for "Old Village"), just south of the Narrows (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narrows) near South Beach, by a small group of Dutch Walloon (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walloon) and Huguenot (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huguenot) families.

Richmond County

At the end of the Second Anglo-Dutch War (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Anglo-Dutch_War) in 1667, the New Netherlands (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Netherlands) colony was ceded to England (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/England) in the Treaty of Breda (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Breda), and what was now anglicized (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglicisation) as Staten Island became part of the new English colony of New York (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Province_of_New_York).

In 1670, the Native Americans ceded all claims to Staten Island to the English in a deed to Gov. Francis Lovelace (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Lovelace). In 1671, in order to encourage an expansion of the Dutch settlements, the English resurveyed Oude Dorp (which became known as Old Town) and expanded the lots along the shore to the south. These lots were settled primarily by Dutch and became known as Nieuwe Dorp (meaning "New Village"), which later became anglicized as New Dorp (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Dorp).

In 1683, the colony of New York was divided into ten counties. As part of this process, Staten Island, as well as several minor neighboring islands, were designated as Richmond County. The name derives from the title of an illegitimate son of King Charles II (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_II_of_England).

In 1687-1688, the English divided the island into four administrative divisions based on natural features, called the North, South, and West divisions, as well as the 5100 acre (21 km²) manorial estate of colonial governor Thomas Dongan (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Dongan) in the central hills known as the "Lordship or Manner of Cassiltown."

These divisions would later evolve into the four townships Northfield, Southfield, Westfield and Castleton.

Land patents in rectangular blocks of eighty acres (320,000 m²) were granted, with the most desirable lands being along the coastline and inland waterways. By 1708, the entire island had been divided up through this fashion into 166 small farms and two large manorial estates, the Dongan estate as well as a 1600 acre (6.5 km²) parcel on the southwestern tip of the island belonging to Christopher Billop (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Christopher_Billop&action=edit) (Jackson, 1995).

In 1729, a county seat was established at the village of Richmond Town (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Richmond_Town&action=edit), located at the headwaters of the Fresh Kills (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fresh_Kills) near the center of the island.

The island played a significant role in the American Revolutionary War (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Revolutionary_War). In the summer of 1776, the British forces under William Howe (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Howe) evacuated Boston (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston) and prepared to attack New York City (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City). Howe used the strategic location of Staten Island as a staging ground for the attack. Howe established his headquarters in New Dorp at the Rose and Crown tavern near the junction of present New Dorp Lane and Amboy Road. It is here that the representatives of the British government reportedly received their first notification of the Declaration of Independence (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Declaration_of_Independence).

The following month, in August 1776, the British forces crossed the Narrows (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narrows) to Brooklyn (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooklyn) and routed the American forces under George Washington (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Washington) at the Battle of Long Island (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Long_Island), resulting in the British capture of New York. Three weeks later, on September 11 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/September_11), 1776 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1776), the British received a delegation of Americans consisting of Benjamin Franklin (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Franklin), Edward Rutledge (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Rutledge), and John Adams (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Adams) at the Conference House (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conference_House) on the southwestern tip of the island (known today as Tottenville (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tottenville)) on the former estate of Christopher Billop (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Christopher_Billop&action=edit). The Americans refused the peace offer from the British in exchange for the withdrawal of the Declaration of Independence (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Declaration_of_Independence), however, and the conference ended without an agreement.

British forces remained on Staten Island throughout the war. Although local sentiment was predominantly Loyalist (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loyalist_%28American_Revolution%29), the islanders found the demands of supporting the troops to be onerous. Many buildings and churches were destroyed, and the military demand for resources resulted in an extensive deforestation (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deforestation) of the island by the end of the war. The British again used the island as a staging ground for their final evacuation of New York City (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City) on December 5 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/December_5), 1783 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1783). After the war, the largest Loyalist landowners fled to Canada (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada) and their estates were subdivided and sold.

On July 4 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/July_4), 1827 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1827), the end of slavery in New York state was celebrated at Swan Hotel, West Brighton. Rooms at the hotel were reserved months in advance as local abolitionists and prominent free blacks prepared for the festivities. Speeches, pageants, picnics, and fireworks marked the celebration, which lasted for two days.

In 1860, parts of Castleton and Southfield were made into a new town, Middletown. The Village of New Brighton in the town of Castleton was incorporated in 1866, and in 1872 the Village of New Brighton annexed all the remainder of the Town of Castleton and became coterminous with the town.

In New York City

All these towns and the villages within them were abolished in 1898 when the City of Greater New York was consolidated, with Richmond as one of its five boroughs.

STT757

August 9th, 2006, 02:18 PM

couldn't the Staten Island railway be connected via tunnel to the second avenue line?

You would have to build six miles of rail tunnel under NY Harbor to connect the Second Avenue Subway to Staten Island, no way will that ever happen.

The most optimistic scenarios for passenger rail to connect Staten Island to the outside world both are through New Jersey, the PATH and Hudson Bergen Light Rail.

They are already working on having MTA Transit Buses connect Staten Island with the HBLRT in Bayonne, if/when the Port Authority does replace the Bayonne Bridge they have a great oppurtunity to connect the HBLRT with Staten Island via the new bridge.

The other scenario is the PATH, they are already doing the planning studies to bring PATH service to Newark Airport, from Newark Airport to Staten Island is only 2 miles.

The Port Authority as with the Bayonne Bridge is studying replacing the Geothals Bridge, again if they include mass transit into the new bridge they could have the PATH train travel south from Newark Airport across the new Geothals Bridge to Staten Island.

Neither of these scenarios requires any tunnels which is where the price tags on public works projects goes ballastic, they also piggyback on two existing projects (the Bayonne Bridge Replacement and the Geothals Bridge Replacement).

The HBLRT is at the foot of the Bayonne Bridge, the PATH is four miles from Staten Island currently. When they extend the PATH to EWR it will be 2 miles from Staten Island, they can use existing Rights of way to avoid having to deal with the expense of land acquasistion.

The Hudson Bergen Light rail could cross over the new Bayonne Bridge and run South through the College of Staten Island to a Park n ride at the Staten Island Mall.

The PATH can cross from Elizabeth to Staten Island via a new Geothals Bridge and immediately access the North Shore Line to St.George Ferry Terminal.

Ed007Toronto

August 9th, 2006, 08:56 PM

Back in the day the plan was to extend the R line from 95th/Fort Hamilton under the narrows and into Staten Island. If I recall correctly this spur was built for this purpose.

ramvid01

August 9th, 2006, 09:11 PM

So i typed in 'new york won staten island with a boat race' on google and this is what i got: